“Catastrophe on the Horizon: Is a New Ocean Forming as a Continent Crumbles?”

Breaking up is hard—just ask anyone who’s gone through a messy split! But did you know one of the world’s continents is also in the midst of a not-so-nice breakup? While your love life might be tumultuous, it pales in comparison to the dramatic geological dance happening along the eastern coast of Africa. Over time, the maps we’ve known and trusted are going to appear as outdated as last year’s fashion trends, thanks to the slow but relentless continental drift. Two tectonic plates are pulling apart, and experts predict that this divide could eventually lead to the birth of a whole new continent. So, can you imagine a future where the geography we know has been completely reshaped? While this monumental change won’t happen overnight—oh no, it could take millions of years—the rumblings of volcanoes and the tremors of earthquakes are just the prelude to the epic saga of geological transformation that’s already begun. Want to dive deeper? LEARN MORE.

Breaking up is hard to do, but one of the world’s continents is going through the difficult process even if it’s going to take a lot of time.

While the current maps of the world are fairly accurate, in the fullness of time they’ll be rendered outdated by continental drift as the various different parts of the world move together and apart again.

One spot in the world where this is happening with particular drama is around the eastern coast of Africa, where two of our planet’s tectonic plates are pulling away from one another.

Experts reckon that this separation will eventually create a new continent that is split off from Africa.

The ground has split open in places, and in a process that could take millions of years a new continent and ocean will form (Julie Rowland, University of Auckland)

On the one hand this continent splitting change isn’t expected to happen for millions of years yet, but on the other hand Professor Ken Macdonald of the University of California warned that rather than being many millions of years away, this split could be between one million and five million years away.

I know that sounds like a long time but it’s sooner than you think, and the professor told the Daily Mail that the separation would not only make a new continent but a new ocean.

He said: “What might happen is that the waters of the Indian Ocean would come in and flood what is now the East African Rift Valley.

“In the human life scale, you won’t be seeing many changes. You’ll be feeling earthquakes, you’ll be seeing volcanoes erupt, but you won’t see the ocean intrude in our lifetimes.”

The rift goes through Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya and Tanzania, and evidence of it already marks the land.

A fissure has already formed and while in some places it is only opening by a few millimetres a year, there are parts of the continent where the cracks in the ground are rather pronounced.

The East African Rift is being pulled apart. (USGS)

While the actual dramatic split and creation of a new continent and ocean are at least a million years away and we’ll all have shuffled off our mortal coils by then, the effects Professor Macdonald spoke of such as volcanoes and earthquakes are going to be a concern for a long time.

According to the Geological Society of London over time the East African Rift will ‘sink lower and lower eventually allowing ocean waters to flood into the basin’.

This change will redraw the map of east Africa, giving some countries a coastline they didn’t previously possess while splitting other nations in two and severing them from the mainland.

Of course, the changes here will take at least a million years to occur, so who’s to say that these countries will even be around or hold the same shape they currently do.