By Jack Bantock, CNN
(CNN) — Time and time again, Hollywood has embraced an imminent apocalypse, as films like “2012” beamed the fictionalized end of the world onto the big screen.
Fortunately, the scientific logic for many such movies has been, to put it lightly, creative. The planet’s crust did not suddenly shift 14 years ago and sweep most of us away in a flurry of earthquakes, eruptions and megatsunamis.
And yet, by the time you reach the end of this sentence, Africa will have moved a little closer to splitting apart. The remote Afar region of Northern Ethiopia sits at the center of a Y-shaped rift system, along which the continent is separating to form a new ocean.
Leave your canned food on the shelf and put down the apocalypse shovel, there’s no need to make a beeline for your doomsday bunker. This is less a case of “The Day After Tomorrow” movie and more a matter of the day after a few million years.
“It can often get lost in communication,” Emma Watts, part of a research team who embarked on an extensive research project to study the area, told CNN.
“People see that and they’re like, ‘Oh no, it’s breaking apart!’ No, it’s very, very slow … I could say it until I’m blue in the face, but people still go for the clickbait title. You just have to kind of grin and bear it.”
A hellish paradise
One of the driest and hottest areas on the planet, where summer temperatures tick over 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit), the aptly-named Afar region is about as remote and hostile as could possibly be. In its Danakil Depression lies the Erta Ale volcano, home to a decades-old lava lake and locally dubbed “the gateway to hell.”
For scientists, though, it’s paradise.
That’s because it sits at the juncture of three tectonic plates — the Main Ethiopian Rift, the Gulf of Aden Rift and the Red Sea Rift — which are gradually spreading apart in a process known as continental rifting. As the plates diverge, the mantle beneath rises and, if seen through to completion, melts to form a new ocean basin.
It’s far from the only triple junction rift system on the planet and continental rifting has been occurring for billions of years, but Afar is invaluable for researchers because the process is, quite literally, taking place under their feet. By the time late-stage rifting occurs, the point at which the ocean floor has almost formed, it’s typically concealed far under the sea.
“Afar is a beautiful place because it (the new ocean floor) is not quite yet submerged,” Watts explained. “It’s giving us a window into a process that we don’t normally see.”
Fascinated by volcanoes since learning about the 1980 eruption of Washington’s Mount St. Helens while at middle school, Watts jumped at the chance to join a team studying the region as she pursued her doctorate in volcanology at the University of Southampton in southern England.
Their research, published last June, found a single, asymmetric plume rising from deep beneath Afar. Geologists had theorized its existence before, but the new findings went a step further by showing the plume to be pulsing in a pattern akin to a “heartbeat,” albeit not necessarily at a constant rhythm.
This pattern is spreading differently at each of the three rifts depending on tectonic conditions, Watts explained, evidence that the plume is dynamic and responsive to the plate above it, not static.
“Before this study, we thought the plume was simple: it came up, it was one composition,” she said.
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