New Ocean to split Ethiopa

by Ecoterra/Sail-World Cruising on 8 Nov 2009 If you feel the world's oceans don't provide enough water for your sailing ambitions, you'll be pleased to know that scientists have now confirmed that they have witnessed the birth of a new ocean - in Ethiopia.

Since a gigantic rift broke open the desert ground in north east Ethiopia in 2005, scientists have speculated the rift was the first step in a process that will split eastern Ethiopia and Somalia from the African continent by a new ocean. Now, they have found proof it indeed will.

As the 56 kilometres large rift was created in 2005, it went almost un-noted due to the sparse population in the Ethiopian desert, starting in the land of the Afar people, but satellite images clearly showed the landscape had changed. At the time, many geologists believed the rift was the beginning of a new ocean as two parts of the African continent pulled apart, but the claim was controversial.

The fissure, now 13 feet wide, formed in just three weeks after an earthquake in a barren region called Boina, some 621 miles north east of the capital, Addis Ababa.

Now, scientists from several countries have confirmed that the volcanic processes at work beneath the Ethiopian rift are nearly identical to those at the bottom of the world's oceans, and the rift is indeed likely to be the beginning of a new sea.

The findings have been presented at a weeklong American Geophysical Union meeting taking place in San Francisco that ends Friday.

'It's amazing,' the BBC quoted one of the Afar researchers, Cindy Ebinger of the Royal Holloway University of London, as saying in San Francisco. 'It's the first large event we've seen like this in a rift zone since the advent of some of the space-based techniques we're now using, and which give us a resolution and a detail to see what's really going on and how the earth processes work.'

However sailors shouldn't get too excited about being able to sail in the new ocean any time soon - according to scientists, it is going to take about a million years to form.