Meet the new continent

I read an interesting but brief article today in Discover magazine, titled "Meet the New Continent". The article discusses (and illustrates with excellent photographs) a 25 foot wide, 1/3 mile long crack in the earth which suddenly appeared in northern Ethiopia last September. Tim Wright, a geophysicist, explains that the rift is caused by the Arabian and African tectonic plates drifting apart. Dr. Wright calculates that in about one million years, the rift will expand sufficiently for the Red Sea to rush in, isolating the Horn from the rest of the African continent, thus forming a new continent. Click here and here for information.