East African Rift

The East African Rift is an active continental rift system running roughly 6,000 kilometers from the Afar Triangle in the north, where it meets the Red Sea Rift and the Gulf of Aden Rift documented elsewhere in this section as the Danakil Depression, south through Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique. It marks the boundary where the African continent is slowly splitting into two new tectonic plates, the Nubian Plate to the west and the smaller Somali Plate to the east, as they pull apart at a rate of a few millimeters per year. The system is typically described in two branches, an eastern rift running through Kenya and Ethiopia and a western rift arcing along the border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, each marked by long, steep-walled rift valleys, chains of active volcanoes including Erta Ale, Mount Nyiragongo and Ol Doinyo Lengai already documented in this section, and deep rift lakes. Over tens of millions of years, continued spreading is expected to eventually open a new ocean basin between the two plates, the same process already more advanced in the Danakil Depression and the Red Sea further north. This entity documents the East African Rift specifically as a geological formation, an active continental rift system splitting Africa into the Nubian and Somali tectonic plates.