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The Red Sea is parting again, but this time Moses doesn’t have a hand in it.

sooda

Veteran Member
The Red Sea is parting again, but this time Moses doesn’t have a hand in it.

Satellite images show that the Arabian tectonic plate and the African plate are moving away from each other, stretching the Earth's crust and widening the southern end of the Red Sea, scientists reported in this week's issue of journal Nature.

Last September, a series of earthquakes started splitting the planet's surface along a 37-mile section of the East African Rift in Afar, Ethiopia.

Using the images gathered by the European Space Agency's Envisat radar satellite, researchers looked at satellite data before and after these activities.

Earth-shattering shift

Over a period of three weeks, the crust on the sides of the rift moved apart by 26 feet and magma—enough to fill a football stadium more than 2,000 times—was injected along a vertical crack, forming a new crust.

"We think that the crust and mantle melt slowly at depths greater than 10 kilometers [6 miles], where it is hotter, forming magma (molten rock)," said Tim J Wright, study co-author, a Royal Society University Research Fellow. "This magma rises through the crust because it is less dense than the surrounding rock.”

The magma collects in magma chambers at depths of 3 to 5 kilometers [1.9 to 3 miles] where the density is the same as the crustal rocks, Wright explained. "Slowly, the pressure has been building up in these chambers until last September when it finally cracked, breaking the crust along a vertical crack. The magma was then injected into this crack."

The intrusion of magma into the gap, rather than the cracking of the crust, is responsible for segmentation of continental drifts.

This is the first rifting episode to have occurred since 1970 and the largest single rip in the Earth's continental crust during the satellite-monitoring era.

"We knew about the steady rifting process in Afar, as Arabia moves away from Africa across the rift," Wright said. "And we knew that occasionally the strain that builds up slowly over centuries is released suddenly in rifting episodes. We did not know how big the deformation could be."

Slow drift

For the past 30 million years Africa and Arabia have been going through a rifting process, the same one that formed the Red Sea. In this amount of time, the 186-mile- wide Afar depression formed.

"The ground is continually moving—much more rapidly now than before the rifting episode," Wright told LiveScience. "On average, the two sides move apart at about 2 centimeters per year [0.8 inches per year]. But, as this event demonstrates, the motion is episodic and jerky. This poses considerable hazard to the local inhabitants, which is higher for the next few years."

This latest split, added to the long-term rifting process, which is tearing the northeast of Ethiopia and Eritrea from the rest of Africa, could eventually create a huge new sea. Although such processes could take millions of years to occur, this event has given scientists an unprecedented opportunity to monitor the rupture in real time.

The Red Sea Parts Again
 

sooda

Veteran Member
The Red Sea is a sea that grows in size because it is widening all the time. The rate of the widening is 1.25 centimeters per year, so it is not something that can be easily seen during a normal human lifespan, but over a longer period of time it will have a much different shape, size, and influence in the region. It is located between the African and the Arabian tectonic plates as an elongated thin sea with
a northwest-southeast direction.

The widening of the Red Sea is due to the movement of the tectonic plates. Africa is moving towards northwest, and that makes it slowly distance itself from the Arabian plate, thus opening more space for the Red Sea.
Read more on Brainly.com - The Red Sea is widening at a rate of 1.25 centimeters per year. How many years will it take to widen - Brainly.com
 

Twilight Hue

Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
I probably wouldn't recommend driving any chariots through. *Grin*

Pretty cool stuff all the same.
 

Twilight Hue

Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
This happened in 2011, but I thought you all might find it interesting.
I'm pretty sure they're still monitoring it.

The idea of the birth of a new sea is pretty cool. It's fun looking at modeling as to where how Earth will look in a million years or so.
 

sooda

Veteran Member
I'm pretty sure they're still monitoring it.

The idea of the birth of a new sea is pretty cool. It's fun looking at modeling as to where how Earth will look in a million years or so.

Its pretty interesting.. The Red Sea is getting wider.. The Arabian Peninsula is tilting towards the East. The Himalayas are still getting taller... There must be other changes going on .. I just don't know about them.
 

shunyadragon

shunyadragon
Premium Member
The specialty of my techtonics geology professor at NCSU was South Pacific continental drift.

The fastest moving continent is Australia and the associated Oceanic plates.

From: Australia Is Drifting So Fast GPS Can't Keep Up

Australia Is Drifting So Fast GPS Can't Keep Up
A significant correction must be made by the end of the year for navigation technology to keep working smoothly.

Australia is not quite where you think it is. The continent has shifted by 4.9 feet since the last adjustment was made to GPS coordinates in 1994, reports the New York Times.

All of the Earth’s continents float on tectonic plates, which glide slowly over a plastic-like layer of the upper mantle. And the plate that Australia sits on has been moving relatively fast, about 2.7 inches a year (northward and with a slight clockwise rotation).

In contrast, the North American plate has been moving roughly one inch a year, though the Pacific plate moves three to four inches a year.

The result is that “some countries are more stationary than others,” says Damien Saunder, the director of cartography for National Geographic. “When there is a significant shift in land masses over time we need to revise the models of the Earth from which GPS coordinates are calculated, so for example your neighbor doesn't end up with your old coordinates." (See how Alaska has finally been mapped as well as Mars.)

I believe the fastest continent in Geologic history was India when broke off from Africa and raced across the Ocean and collided with Asia creating the Himalayas.
 
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sooda

Veteran Member
The specialty of my techtonics geology professor at NCSU was South Pacific continental drift.

The fastest moving continent is Australia and the associated Oceanic plates.

From: Australia Is Drifting So Fast GPS Can't Keep Up

Australia Is Drifting So Fast GPS Can't Keep Up
A significant correction must be made by the end of the year for navigation technology to keep working smoothly.

Australia is not quite where you think it is. The continent has shifted by 4.9 feet since the last adjustment was made to GPS coordinates in 1994, reports the New York Times.

All of the Earth’s continents float on tectonic plates, which glide slowly over a plastic-like layer of the upper mantle. And the plate that Australia sits on has been moving relatively fast, about 2.7 inches a year (northward and with a slight clockwise rotation).

In contrast, the North American plate has been moving roughly one inch a year, though the Pacific plate moves three to four inches a year.

The result is that “some countries are more stationary than others,” says Damien Saunder, the director of cartography for National Geographic. “When there is a significant shift in land masses over time we need to revise the models of the Earth from which GPS coordinates are calculated, so for example your neighbor doesn't end up with your old coordinates." (See how Alaska has finally been mapped as well as Mars.)

Oh my. How fabulous. I wish I'd had a course like that. Can they predict where Australia is going?
 

shunyadragon

shunyadragon
Premium Member
Oh my. How fabulous. I wish I'd had a course like that. Can they predict where Australia is going?

It will collide with the Malasia, Indonesia and New Guinea archipelago chain of islands, which are volcanic Islands along a rift zone created by Australia's move north.
 

sooda

Veteran Member
It will collide with the Malasia, Indonesia and New Guinea archipelago chain of islands, which are volcanic Islands along a rift zone created by Australia's move north.

Fascinating.. so it moving north? I'll have to look at a map.
 

Aupmanyav

Be your own guru
Its pretty interesting.. The Red Sea is getting wider.. The Arabian Peninsula is tilting towards the East. The Himalayas are still getting taller... There must be other changes going on .. I just don't know about them.
Baja California, for example.
 

shunyadragon

shunyadragon
Premium Member
Fascinating.. so it moving north? I'll have to look at a map.

Australia was once a part of Antarctica. When it broke away and moved north it changed the climate of Antarctica when the Ocean currents girdling Antarctica created the present climate.
 

sooda

Veteran Member
Himalaya-formation.gif
 
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