The 3,700-mile-long Great Rift Valley, which runs through Kenya, formed as a result of tectonic plates drifting apart, and it may eventually flood to separate Africa from a new continent. So even though the crack that formed in Kenya is shocking, it’s actually just a small piece of visible evidence of something that’s been happening for millions of years. “Whereas the rift has remained tectonically inactive in the recent past, there could be movements deep within the Earth’s crust that have resulted in zones of weakness extending all the way to the surface.” “The valley has a history of tectonic and volcanic activities,” geologist David Adede tells Kenyan news outlet the Daily Nation.
The East African Rift, writes fault dynamics researcher Lucia Perez Diaz in The Conversation, is an example of how plate tectonics can eventually create new plate boundaries altogether.
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They float on top of the asthenosphere, which is viscous but also plastic, allowing the rigid plates to move around in relation to each other and push, shear, or pull apart at fault lines. This phenomenon occurred because tectonic plates, which form the Earth’s crust, don’t simply stay put.
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