The East African Rift is an active continental rift zone in East Africa that appears to be a developing divergent tectonic plate boundary. In the past it was considered to be part of a larger Great Rift Valley that extended north to Asia Minor. The rift is a narrow zone in which the African Plate is in the process of splitting into two new tectonic plates called the Somali Plate and the Nubian Plate, which are subplates or protoplates.
Read more about East African Rift: Extent, Volcanic Activity, Discoveries in Human Evolution
Famous quotes containing the words east and/or african:
“The beds i’ th’ East are soft.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The sacrifice to Legba was completed; the Master of the Crossroads had taken the loas’ mysterious routes back to his native Guinea.
Meanwhile, the feast continued. The peasants were forgetting their misery: dance and alcohol numbed them, carrying away their shipwrecked conscience in the unreal and shady regions where the savage madness of the African gods lay waiting.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)