New Scientist is ready to weigh anchor in the Sahara, now that it looks like Ethiopia is getting its very own brand new ocean:
“The ferocity of what we saw during this episode stunned everyone,” says Cynthia Ebinger, a team member at the University of Rochester in New York.
While the Mount Dabbahu rift is still hundreds of kilometres inland, Ebinger says it could continue to widen and lengthen. “As the plates keep spreading apart, it will end up looking like the Red Sea,” she says.
Eventually it could reach the east coast of Ethiopia and fill up with seawater. “At some point, if that spreading and rifting continues, then that area will be flooded,” says Ken Macdonald, a marine geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved with the study.