I’m sure we’ll see some emails from beachfront land speculators in Nigeria and Ethiopia soon.
On the serious side, University of Rochester researchers have found evidence that Earth, doing what it darn well pleases despite our protestations, is making a new ocean in the African desert.
African Desert Rift Confirmed as New Ocean in the Making
Geologists Show that Seafloor Dynamics Are at Work in Splitting African Continent
In 2005, a gigantic, 35-mile-long rift broke open the desert ground in Ethiopia. At the time, some geologists believed the rift was the beginning of a new ocean as two parts of the African continent pulled apart, but the claim was controversial.
Now, scientists from several countries have confirmed that the volcanic processes at work beneath the Ethiopian rift are nearly identical to those at the bottom of the world’s oceans, and the rift is indeed likely the beginning of a new sea.
The new study, published in the latest issue of Geophysical Research Letters, suggests that the highly active volcanic boundaries along the edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large sections, instead of little by little as has been predominantly believed. In addition, such sudden large-scale events on land pose a much more serious hazard to populations living near the rift than would several smaller events, says Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester and co-author of the study.
“This work is a breakthrough in our understanding of continental rifting leading to the creation of new ocean basins,” says Ken Macdonald, professor emeritus in the Department of Earth Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and who is not affiliated with the research. “For the first time they demonstrate that activity on one rift segment can trigger a major episode of magma injection and associated deformation on a neighboring segment. Careful study of the 2005 mega-dike intrusion and its aftermath will continue to provide extraordinary opportunities for learning about continental rifts and mid-ocean ridges.”
“The whole point of this study is to learn whether what is happening in Ethiopia is like what is happening at the bottom of the ocean where it’s almost impossible for us to go,” says Ebinger. “We knew that if we could establish that, then Ethiopia would essentially be a unique and superb ocean-ridge laboratory for us. Because of the unprecedented cross-border collaboration behind this research, we now know that the answer is yes, it is analogous.”
Atalay Ayele, professor at the Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, led the investigation, painstakingly gathering seismic data surrounding the 2005 event that led to the giant rift opening more than 20 feet in width in just days. Along with the seismic information from Ethiopia, Ayele combined data from neighboring Eritrea with the help of Ghebrebrhan Ogubazghi, professor at the Eritrea Institute of Technology, and from Yemen with the help of Jamal Sholan of the National Yemen Seismological Observatory Center. The map he drew of when and where earthquakes happened in the region fit tremendously well with the more detailed analyses Ebinger has conducted in more recent years.
Ayele’s reconstruction of events showed that the rift did not open in a series of small earthquakes over an extended period of time, but tore open along its entire 35-mile length in just days. A volcano called Dabbahu at the northern end of the rift erupted first, then magma pushed up through the middle of the rift area and began “unzipping” the rift in both directions, says Ebinger.
Since the 2005 event, Ebinger and her colleagues have installed seismometers and measured 12 similar—though dramatically less intense—events.
“We know that seafloor ridges are created by a similar intrusion of magma into a rift, but we never knew that a huge length of the ridge could break open at once like this,” says Ebinger. She explains that since the areas where the seafloor is spreading are almost always situated under miles of ocean, it’s nearly impossible to monitor more than a small section of the ridge at once so there’s no way for geologists to know how much of the ridge may break open and spread at any one time. “Seafloor ridges are made up of sections, each of which can be hundreds of miles long. Because of this study, we now know that each one of those segments can tear open in a just a few days.”
Ebinger and her colleagues are continuing to monitor the area in Ethiopia to learn more about how the magma system beneath the rift evolves as the rift continues to grow.
Additional authors of the study include Derek Keir, Tim Wright, and Graham Stuart, professors of earth and environment at the University of Leeds, U.K.; Roger Buck, professor at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, N.Y.; and Eric Jacques, professor at the Institute de Physique du Globe de Paris, France.
Must be time to cap and trade new oceans. I blame Big Crack.
I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist
There was a ‘b’ grade sci-fi movie about this topic year — the answer was to use an A – bomb to save the world. Kinda long the same lines as the ‘B’ grade global warming movie years ago– but it had a giant squid — I was about 10 years old at the time, so it was pretty cool– I think a bomb on Washington-london- and Copenhagen might go a long way to saving the planet– anybody have a good script with some ‘A’bombs in it to save the planet ?? Maybe Algore would finance the movie– maybe called “An Inconvient Bomb’ made by “An Inconvient Boob !”
Ethiopia is supposed to be where man originated.
The warmists will be delighted and make pilgrimages.
Will sea levels fall across the planet when this hole fills up with water?
James F. Evans wrote:
“Interestingly enough, this rift is consistent with a controversial hypothesis that the Earth is expanding in diameter.
There are some 40,000 miles of mid-ocean spreading ridges, where the Earth spreads apart, such as is observed, here, in this study.
The basic idea is that unless there is an equal length of subducting plates, then the Earth must be expanding.”
This sort of rift can be compensated for by the scrunching up of the rocks on either side. As well as the ‘loss’ of surface area in ocean trenches there is the loss due to the scrunching up of mountains. For example India is still driving into Asia and the Rockies and Andies are on continents that are moving west.
cough-expanding!-cough
Global warming causes volcanoes.
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090917/full/news.2009.926.html
Although this is a subscription site, I am sure that other readers can acess the full content. A feature also appeard in New Scientist a few weeks back. seems that Fred Houlihan was rather taken by this piece of science.
McGuire said publicly that SLR is 5mm per year. Obviously the weight of all that water is causing volcanoes on the sea bed near Easter Island.
Cheers
Paul
Surely by using our vast technological prowess, humanity can repair this defect in our planet and restore Gaia’s natural balance. Big staples?
Or (here’s a thought), open a sea channel/canal to the Rift Valley in order to drain off the rising seas, thereby saving Florida, Mauritius, and other valuable lowlands from drowning in Al’s Big Flood.
Geo-engineering. Everybody grab a shovel.
“Will sea levels fall across the planet when this hole fills up with water?” wobble
Good question. No, under my newly created “Steady State Earth Theory” new water will be created as the rift expands.
Allah’s plumber
If there is anything I have learned from the Man-made global warming controversy, is that there are a lot of assumptions in the scientific arena.
And if these assumptions are not challenged they become the conventional wisdom.
Assumptions have now become the conventional wisdom that the science is “settled” on AGW.
But is that the case?
A lot of readers, here, including myself, say, “hell no”.
Numerous individuals in geology have pointed to assumptions that have colored geology:
“Van Andel (1984) conceded that plate tectonics had serious flaws, and that the need for a growing number of ad hoc modifications cast doubt on its claim to be the ultimate unifying global theory. Lowman (1992a) argued that geology has largely become “a bland mixture of descriptive research and interpretive papers in which the interpretation is a facile cookbook application of plate-tectonics concepts … used as confidently as trigonometric functions” (p. 3). Lyttleton and Bondi (1992) held that the difficulties facing plate tectonics and the lack of study of alternative explanations for seemingly supportive evidence reduced the plausibility of the theory.”
Gee, where have we seen this type of reasoning?
Sorry for being of topic, but it seems that major new development in climate science is underway. Namely, it appears that Roy Spencer went along with IPCC consensus science! Whether it is genuine U turn in Spencer understanding or not I don’t know, but what Spencer now is saying is that climate sensitivity of IPCC models is not so high, and that his own analysis basically confirms that. http://www.drroyspencer.com/
In his recent comment on Lindzen and Choi (2009) Spencer is confusing. First, he says that:
“while I tend to agree with the Lindzen and Choi position that the real climate system is much less sensitive than the IPCC climate models suggest, it is not clear to me that their results actually demonstrate this.”
That sounds like he is not convinced by Lindzen and Choi analysis, but that he agrees with their conclusions on other grounds. But, then he presents his own analysis which concludes on the contrary:
“So, my ERBE results are not that different from the models.”
So, does he think that model sensitivity is “far too high” or “not so different” from his analysis?
I think that first comment we shall treat just as a rhetorical remnants of old, skeptical Spencer, while his real present convictions are expressed in the second comment.
Moreover, in one of his previous blog posts Spencer calculates the climate sensitivity from the satellite data to be 1.6 to 2 deg C, living ample room for upward adjustments in the future to make them completely in line with models, by emphasizing that his calculations were based on “only 9 years of satellite record while “the model results shown in the above figure come from 50 years of output from each of the 18 models”.
You can bet that new Spencer’s paper which is for fourth or fifth time under review in a different journal basically repeats all of that. And you can probably also bet that you will not be able to find a word in it about “too high sensitivity” of IPCC climate models.
That seems a very serious matter to me. One of the most powerful minds in the climate science, until now highly skeptical, essentially accepted IPCC line. Alarmists have a good reason to celebrate.
“Adolfo Giurfa (12:42:35) :
Gaia is growing fat and ripping its skirt apart.! Astonishing!. I will look for other rifts in Google Earth, along plate boundaries.”
I think you will find one of the North West coast around the Canary islands. A whole island is cracking apart, and if it finnaly splits (Which it will do) it will create a tsunami which will be bad news for the entire Eastern seaboard of the USA.
“Ray (13:07:21) :
Darn, Ethiopia will now get more rain and turn all green and could be a good place to live. It will give food to the people.”
Ethiopia is not the dust bowl it’s made out to be in the MSM, it is actually quite fertile.
“Mark Hugoson (13:11:31) :”
Admirable effort indeed. The other issue facing Ethiopia with trees and water is that the Eucalyptus was introduced in the 1960’s I think and is now wreaking havock with other species and soaking up as much ground water as root can find.
Quick – everyone in Ethiopia buy a Prius!
paulhan (15:25:02) : In the animation you show it is said that the only place where marsupial exists is in Australia. Surprinsingly there are marsupials where your animation shows Australia contacted South America. Here in Lima, capital of Peru (12°S, 75°W) we have a marsupial called Opossum (spanish:zarigueya) but there are also marsupials in the southern peruvian amazon jungle, at the Manu national park. (Madre de Dios department).
ShrNfr (13:53:54) :
Perhaps they will name the new rift the Al Gorge?
QOTW contender??
One of the TV science programs, Nature – I think, explained all this about 15 years ago in living-moving color and animation. It took about 15 seconds for eastern Africa to separate and for the rift to fill with water. Similarly, this story has been done in National Geographic magazine. I’m not going to look up the references to this stuff, they ought to be easy to find. These rifts are either the result of too much CO2 or George Bush and I can’t do much about either at this point.
The horror. The crack is shaped like hockey stick.
Will sea level fall when the rift opens to the ocean?
A little counter-intuitive but sea level will actually rise (but it will take awhile).
New ocean basins start out shallow and it takes over 100 million years for that new ocean to deepen and reach the average depths of older mature oceans at 6,000 metres.
So as this new shallow ocean is opening, mature deeper ocean basins will be subducting below a continent somewhere. Overall, the average depth of the ocean becomes more shallow and all that ocean water can’t be held in a smaller overall basin, so sea level goes up (in time).
Click on the googlemap linked above and zoom out until you can see the Red Sea above it. Notice how shallow it is. Notice the mid-oceanic ridges in the middle of it. Zoom out even further and look at the mid-oceanic ridges all over the planet. The Continents used to be right next to those ridges. One can even pick out where Gondwana unzipped and split apart a little southeast of this location – as most large continents eventually do.
“Will sea levels fall across the planet when this hole fills up with water?” wobble
I’d say, no, the opposite. There might be slightly more surface area to work with, but less depth.
The new ocean floor will be shallow, as it has to tear down through the continental shelf before it achieves any real depth. On the other side, specifically the oceanic portions of the Indian and Australian plates, are being subducted under the Sunda plate. Thus, you lose out on overall depth, which means volume, which means higher sea levels everywhere else.
Of course, the Somalian Plate is still moving more slowly than, say most of the plates around the Ring of Fire, so while there’s going to be imminent sea level changes, don’t hold your breath.
Interesting article.
“click for very large image (2.4MB)”
Clicking on the image gives me a 60.9kb image. Misprint under the image or wrong link?
So if this crack turns into another sea, filling it up will compensate and keep the sea level from rising when Antarctica and Greenland melt.
And you beach folks were worried !
🙂
Mike
elev 99′ MSL
Stephen Wilde (15:18:51) : “Time and again I am seeing statements of the previously well known and obvious dressed up as new findings in every field of science.”
The other side of the coin is the glut of post-modernist publications contradicting the well known and obvious. Why? Because that’s the only way to attract any attention. Too many scientists, too few horizons, too little creativity.
ShrNfr (13:53:54) : “Perhaps they will name the new rift the Al Gorge?”
Works for me, ShrNfr.
http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/pic/HPM/BM1172~Say-No-To-Crack-Posters.jpg
Just say no.