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Since elementary school, we’ve known that our planet had five oceans, right? Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Antarctic and Arctic, that does sound familiar, right? Well, get ready because just when we thought we knew everything about our planet, science has left us speechless: a sixth ocean. Yes, just like you read,
a sixth ocean that is starting to form under the sun of the Afar Depression,
in the Horn of Africa.
How is that possible? A fissure in the African, Somali and Arabian tectonic plates has caused the eruption of the Dabbahu volcano and is already more than 60 kilometres long, and when the Indian Ocean enters the crack, this continent will become a large island and we will have one more ocean.
What does this mean? Hold on, we’ll explain it.
Plate + plate = new ocean
That’s right, you surely remember natural science classes where they explained tectonic plates, if you don’t remember, we’ll give you a quick summary. Imagine that the planet is a giant pudding and that the top layer is made of cookie pieces, well those cookie pieces sitting on top of the mantle sink, separate or crash into each other all the time. On a human scale we don’t notice, but the truth is that they move a little more every day. So, when two plates move apart, the gap left behind gets filled with magma that rises to the surface.
In Afar, this process is even bigger because there are three tectonic plates in contact: African to the west, Somali to the east and Arabian to the north. The tension that built up was released twenty years ago: the ground cracked, the magma came up and the plain was marked by a glowing trench that is still growing today.
Timeline of a rupture foretold
On September 26, 2005, the Dabbahu roared loudly. The eruption released enough energy to open a crack visible from space and triggered a series of earthquakes that reshaped the terrain. Later, it was confirmed that the land had shifted 6 meters in just 10 days! Since then, the fissure has been growing between 2 and 3 centimetres per year, a pace fast enough for scientists to predict the arrival of the sea in less than a million years, so sorry, it doesn’t look like we’re going to see it happen…
A potential marine sanctuary
When water floods the crack, the temperature will turn the new basin into an oasis for extremophiles. So, the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea will flood this region and turn it into a new ocean that could host, who knows how many new and unknown species?
Geopolitics and economy on the ocean board
Separating part of Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique from the rest of Africa will redefine borders and Exclusive Economic Zones. Future ports on the new eastern coast could shift trade routes between Asia and Europe, sharing the spotlight with Suez. Who knows how the African map will look in the end?
So, when then?
Well… Like we said earlier, it doesn’t seem like we’re going to see it fill up… better to imagine it, because estimates say it will happen in 10 million years.
So yes, there will be a new ocean in the Afar Depression, but we won’t see it now or in the next decade. Even so, how interesting it is to see how our planet keeps giving us moments like this where we can put into practice what we learned in elementary school and thought was useless!
While the crack widens under the African sun, humanity watches the prelude of an ocean that, one day, will be crossed by ships and mapped by satellites!
