About 250 million years ago, you could pretty easily walk from what is now Australia to North America – with a pit stop in Antarctica.
This was when the Earth was one continent called Pangaea that slowly broke apart and spread out to form the continents we know today.
These continents aren’t going to stay in place forever, however.
A scientist has warned that one is being torn in two at a pace far quicker than expected.
Could a continent split in two in the future?
While it’s hard to predict what the Earth’s surface will look like in a million years’ time, geologists have already located one place where a new continent is likely to form.
A 35-mile long fissure discovered in Ethiopia’s desert in 2005 has continued to widen by 6-7mm per year.
It’s linked to a 2000-mile long, 22-million year old rift called the East Africa Rift System, which is thought to have been caused by movements of the Earth’s tectonic plates.
Tectonic plates – huge pieces made of the planet’s crust and upper mantle -pull apart, crash together and slide past each other, these plates irritate volcanoes and cause earthquakes.
Eastern Africa is perched on the Somalia plate which has been pulling away from the rest of the continent on the Nubian plate for about 25,00,000 years, literal ground-breaking research found in 2012.
Geologists say that the colossal, 2,000-mile-long fissure slicing through southeastern Africa has been widening by 6-7mm per year.
Once the split becomes large enough for a body of water to form, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania and some parts of Ethiopia would form a new continent – called ‘the Nubian continent’ – separated by the world’s sixth ocean.
‘What might happen is that the waters of the Indian Ocean would come in and flood what is now the East African Rift Valley,’ Ken Macdonald, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told MailOnline.
‘There’s slippage and faults creating earthquake activity, along with visible signs of active volcanoes.’
When will this happen?
Geologists have spent the last few years trying to work out exactly when, where and why the split is happening.
The Geological Society of London says of Africa’s severing: ‘Today the EAR remains above sea level however in the future, as extension continues along the rift, the rift valley will sink lower and lower eventually allowing ocean waters to flood into the basin.
‘If rifting continues, new basaltic oceanic crust may form along the centre of the rift producing a new narrow ocean basin with its own mid-ocean ridge between the Nubian and Somalian plates.’
Researchers have long suspected that this process – which could end in Madagascar being ripped into two islands – would take tens of millions of years.
But MacDonald said this may happen in only one to five million years.
‘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,’ she added.
Why is this happening?
While all this activity is happening under people’s feet, parts of Africa are already feeling the effects.
In 2005, a 35-mile fissure yawned apart in Ethiopia. About 13 years later in Kenya, another fissure opened amid heavy rainfall.
Experts say the continent rift is being driven by the ejection of super-hot rock spat out by the planet’s core. All this molten spit-up is swishing around and moving the plates around.
Others have suggested that the lithosphere, a layer of the Earth’s mantle that ‘floats’ on the more fluid-like and weaker asthenosphere, could be to blame. You can think of it like an iceberg floating in the ocean.
The African Superplume, a swollen slab of mantle beneath southwest Africa, is stretching this layer very thinly so it is ‘sinking’ into the soupy rock beneath it, pushing the plates apart.
This article was first published on January 24, 2025.
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