Great Rift Valley - Crack in the Planets Crust

Great Rift Valley - Crack in the Planet's Crust The Rift Valley of eastern Africa and Asia (sometimes called the Great Rift Valley [GRV] or East African Rift system [EAR or EARS]) is an enormous geological split in the crust of the earth, thousands of kilometers long, up to 125 miles (200 kilometers) wide, and between a few hundred to thousands of meters deep. First designated as the Great Rift Valley in the late 19th century and visible from space, the valley has also been a great source of hominid fossils, most famously in Tanzanias Olduvai Gorge. Key Takeaways: Great Rift Valley The Great Rift Valley is a huge fracture in the crust of the earth in the eastern part of Africa.  Crustal rifts are found all over the world, but the one in East Africa is the largest.  The rift is a complex series of faultlines that runs from the Red Sea down into Mozambique.The Lake Turkana basin in the rift region is known as the Cradle of Mankind and has been a source of hominid fossils since the 1970s.A 2019 paper suggests that the Kenyan and Ethiopian rifts are evolving into one single oblique rift.   The Rift Valley is the result of an ancient series of faults, rifts, and volcanoes deriving from the shifting of tectonic plates at the junction between the Somalian and the African plates. Scholars recognize two branches of the GRV: the eastern half- which is that piece north of Lake Victoria that runs NE/SW and meets the Red Sea; and the western half- running nearly N/S from Victoria to the Zambezi river in Mozambique. The eastern branch rifts first occurred 30 million years ago, the western 12.6 million years ago. In terms of rift evolution, many parts of the Great Rift Valley are in different stages, from pre-rift in the Limpopo valley, to initial-rift stage at the Malawi rift; to typical-rift stage in the northern Tanganyika rift region; to advanced-rift stage in the Ethiopian rift region; and finally to oceanic-rift stage in the Afar range. That means the region is still quite tectonically active: see Chorowicz (2005) for much more detail concerning the ages of the different rift regions. Geography and Topography The East African Rift System stretches from the Red Sea to Mozambique. It is marked by the African Great Lakes and is currently the largest rift of the world. S. Brune; Kartengrundlage: Nasa-World-Wind The Eastern African Rift Valley is a long valley flanked by uplifted shoulders that step down to the central rift by more or less parallel faults. The main valley is classed as a continental rift, extending from 12 degrees north to 15 degrees south of our planets​ equator. It extends a length of 3,500 km  and intersects major portions of the modern countries of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, and Mozambique and minor portions of others. The width of the valley varies between 30 km to 200 km (20-125 mi), with the widest section at the northern end where it links to the Red Sea in the Afar region of Ethiopia. The depth of the valley varies across eastern Africa, but for most of its length it is more than 1 km (3280 feet) deep and at its deepest, in Ethiopia, it is over 3 km (9,800 ft) deep. The topographical steepness of its shoulders and the depth of the valley have created specialized microclimates and hydrology within its walls. Most rivers are short and small within the valley, but a few follow the rifts for hundreds of kilometers, discharging into deep lake basins. The valley acts as a north-south corridor for the migration of animals and birds  and inhibits east/west movements. When glaciers dominated most of Europe and Asia during the Pleistocene, the rift lake basins were havens for animals and plant life, including early hominins. History of the Rift Valley Studies Following on the mid- to late-19th-century work of dozens of explorers including the famous David Livingstone, the concept of an East African rift fracture was established by Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, and named the Great Rift Valley of East Africa in 1896 by British geologist John Walter Gregory. In 1921, Gregory described the GRV as a system of graben basins which included the valleys of the Red and Dead Seas in western Asia, as the Afro-Arabian rift system. Gregorys interpretation of the GRV formation was that two faults had opened up and a central piece dropped down forming the valley (called a graben). Since Gregorys investigations, scholars have re-interpreted the rift as the result of multiple graben faults organized over a major fault line at the plate juncture. The faults occurred in time from the Paleozoic to Quaternary eras, a time span of some 500 million years. In many areas, there have been repeated rifting events, including at least seven phases of rifting over the past 200 million years. Paleontology in the Rift Valley In the 1970s, paleontologist Richard Leakey designated the East African Rift region as the Cradle of Mankind, and there is no doubt that the earliest hominids- members of the Homo species- arose within its boundaries. Why that happened is a matter of conjecture, but may have something to do with the steep valley walls and microclimates created within them. The interior of the rift valley was isolated from the rest of Africa during the Pleistocene ice age  and sheltered freshwater lakes located in savannahs. As with other animals, our early ancestors may have found refuge there when the ice covered much of the planet and then evolved as hominids within its tall shoulders. An interesting study on the genetics of frog species by Freilich and colleagues showed that the valleys micro-climates and topography are at least, in this case, a biogeographic barrier that resulted in the splitting of the species into two separate gene pools. It is the eastern branch (much of Kenya and Ethiopia) where much of the paleontological work has identified hominids. Beginning about 2 million years ago, barriers in the eastern branch eroded away, a time which is coeval (as much as that clock can be called co-eval) with the spread of Homo species outside of Africa. Rift Evolution Analysis of the rift reported by German geologist Sascha Brune and colleagues in March 2019 (Corti et al. 2019) suggests that although the rift began as two overlapping disconnected rifts (Ethiopian and Kenyan), the lateral offset that lies in the Turkana depression has evolved and continues to evolve into a single oblique rift.   In March of 2018, a great crack measuring 50 feet wide and miles long opened up in the Suswa area of southwestern Kenya. Scientists believe the cause was not a sudden recent shift of the tectonic plates, but rather the abrupt erosion to the surface of a long-standing subsurface crack that developed over thousands of years. Recent heavy rains caused the soil to collapse over the crack, exposing it to the surface, rather like a sinkhole.  Ã‚   Selected Sources Blinkhorn, J., and M. Grove. The Structure of the Middle Stone Age of Eastern Africa. Quaternary Science Reviews 195 (2018): 1–20. Print.Chorowicz, Jean. The East African Rift System. Journal of African Earth Sciences 43.1–3 (2005): 379–410. Print.Corti, Giacomo, et al. Aborted Propagation of the Ethiopian Rift Caused by Linkage with the Kenyan Rift. Nature Communications 10.1 (2019): 1309. Print.Deino, Alan L., et al. Chronology of the Acheulean to Middle Stone Age Transition in Eastern Africa. Science 360.6384 (2018): 95–98. Print.Freilich, Xenia, et al. Comparative Phylogeography of Ethiopian Anurans: Impact of the Great Rift Valley and Pleistocene Climate Change. BMC Evolutionary Biology 16.1 (2016): 206. Print.Frostick, L. Africa: Rift Valley. Encyclopedia of Geology. Eds. Cocks, L. Robin M. and Ian R. Plimer. Oxford: Elsevier, 2005. 26–34. Print.Sahnouni, Mohamed, et al. 1.9-Million- and 2.4-Million-Year-Old Artifacts and Stone Tool-Cutmarked Bones from Ain Boucherit, Algeria. Science 362.6420 (2018): 1297–301. Print. Simon, Brendan, et al. Deformation and Sedimentary Evolution of the Lake Albert Rift (Uganda, East African Rift System). Marine and Petroleum Geology 86 (2017): 17–37. Print.