A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm.

The crack, 20 feet wide in spots, opened in 2005 and some geologists
believed then that it would spawn a new ocean. But that view was
controversial, and the rift had not been well studied.

A new study involving an international team of scientists and
reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds the
processes creating the rift are nearly identical to what goes on at the
bottom of oceans, further indication a sea is in the region's future.

The same rift activity is slowly parting the Red Sea, too.

Using newly gathered seismic data from 2005, researchers
reconstructed the event to show the rift tore open along its entire
35-mile length in just days. Dabbahu, a volcano at the northern end of
the rift, erupted first, then magma pushed up through the middle of the
rift area and began "unzipping" the rift in both directions, the
researchers explained in a statement today.

"We know that seafloor ridges are created by a similar intrusion of
magma into a rift, but we never knew that a huge length of the ridge
could break open at once like this," said Cindy Ebinger, professor of
earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester and
co-author of the study.

The result shows that highly active volcanic boundaries along the
edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large
sections, instead of in bits, as the leading theory held. And such
sudden large-scale events on land pose a much more serious hazard to
populations living near the rift than would several smaller events,
Ebinger said.

"The whole point of this study is to learn whether what is happening
in Ethiopia is like what is happening at the bottom of the ocean where
it's almost impossible for us to go," says Ebinger. "We knew that if we
could establish that, then Ethiopia would essentially be a unique and
superb ocean-ridge laboratory for us. Because of the unprecedented
cross-border collaboration behind this research, we now know that the
answer is yes, it is analogous."

The African and Arabian plates meet in the remote Afar desert of Northern Ethiopia
and have been spreading apart in a rifting process - at a speed of less than 1
inch per year - for the past 30 million years. This rifting formed the
186-mile Afar depression and the Red Sea. The thinking is that the Red Sea will eventually pour into the new sea in a million years or so. The new ocean would connect to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, an arm of the Arabian Sea between Yemen on the
Arabian Peninsula and Somalia in eastern Africa.

Atalay Ayele, professor at the Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia,
led the investigation, gathering seismic data with help from neighboring Eritrea and Ghebrebrhan Ogubazghi, professor at the Eritrea Institute of
Technology, and from Yemen with the help of Jamal Sholan of the
National Yemen Seismological Observatory Center.

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