We all know that the surface of the earth can be divided into two parts: oceans and land, specifically seven continents and four oceans, of which seven continents belong to six continents, namely Eurasia, Africa, North America, South America, Australia and Antarctica. In fact, the sea and land on the earth's surface are changing all the time, but from the limited time of human beings, it is difficult to see the changes in sea and land.
Will the Great Rift Valley create the Seventh Continent?
However, there are times when land and sea change can also become very rapid, such as in a submarine volcanic eruption, due to the continuous rise of lava eruption submarine volcanoes, within a few days may emerge from the sea, forming a new island. However, most of the time, the change of land and sea is very slow, and its time scale is measured in tens of thousands of years, or even hundreds of millions of years. The sea and land changes on the Earth's surface depend mainly on the Earth's plate movement.
Location map of the Great Rift Valley
The lithosphere on the Earth's surface is divided into six major plates by many fault zones, including the Eurasian Plate, the African Plate, the American Plate, the Indian Ocean Plate, the Pacific Plate and the Antarctic Plate, although the interior of a certain plate can also be divided into several small plates, and the continents are located on these plates. The movement of these plates is mainly two types: collision (extinction boundary) and tensile fracture (growth boundary).
Map of the six major plates and the Great Rift Valley of East Africa
It is possible to separate or merge continents through the movement of plates, and the most likely area for new continents to appear at present is in eastern Africa, where there is a huge fault zone, which we call the "Great Rift Valley". The Great Rift Valley was formed due to the tension fissures within the African plate, and the plates on both sides of the rift valley separated from each other, and a deep rift valley belt appeared on the continent, and as the separation continued, the East African Rift Valley was constantly widening and deepening.
The Great Rift Valley of East Africa
In the area of the Great Rift Valley, due to the low-lying terrain, a series of tectonic lakes in the form of beaded distributions have been formed, including Lake Victoria, Lake Tanganyika, Lake Malawi and Lake Turkana. The Great Rift Valley runs from the Red Sea in the north, through the Ethiopian and East African plateaus, and south to the mouth of the Zambezi River, with a total length of more than 5,800 kilometers from north to south. The formation of the Great Rift Valley dates back 30 million years, and the tension between the plates has been continuing for 30 million years, and the "scar of the earth" of the East African Rift Valley is getting bigger and bigger.
Map of the Distribution of the Great Rift Valley
We can envisage that in the future, as the Great Rift Valley continues to expand, eventually seawater will be poured into the Rift Valley, part of the land east of the Great Rift Valley will be separated from the African continent, and the East African Rift Valley will become a new ocean, and its formation process will be similar to the formation process of the Red Sea. So, will the part of the land that separates from the African continent become the seventh continent of the world?
The total area of the African continent is about 30.2 million square kilometers, and the part that will be separated in the future is about one-sixth of the african continent, that is, about 5 million square kilometers. The land is between the world's smallest continent, Australia (7.69 million square kilometers) and Greenland, the world's largest island (2.16 million square kilometers). So whether this land is a continent or an island, it seems that it will be decided again at that time, but this matter will happen at least tens of millions of years later, if this land is considered the "seventh continent", then what should it be called?
Waterfalls in the Great Rift Valley