The East African Rift System is slowly breaking down, Madagascar falling apart

The African continent is slowly splitting into several large and small tectonic nick blocks with a long island off the coast of East-Africa – the Diraging East African Rift System, which itself will break up into smaller islands.

This development will redefine Africa and the Indian Ocean. D. of the Department of Geoscience for Journalists. These findings come from a new study by Sarah Stamps Geology. A breakup is the breakup of the super-continent Penguin about 200 million years ago.

Sure, though, this won’t happen anytime soon.

Stamps, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech College College of Science, said current break-ups are millimeters every year, so new oceans would take millions of years to form. “The rate of expansion is the fastest in the north, so we’ll see new seas forming there.”

Tahiri Rajaonrizer, a doctoral student at Geosins, has set up a GPS instrument in northern Madagascar in this 2016 photograph. Behind Tahir are the Indian Ocean and a rock island. Photo credit: Reina Andrianasolo.

“Most previous studies suggest that the expansion microplates are localized in the surrounding narrow zone that proceeds independently of the surrounding large tectonic plates,” Stamps said. The new GPS dataset of very specific surface motion in East Africa, Madagascar and some islands in the Indian Ocean states that the break-through process is more complex and more distributed than previously thought, according to a study completed by researchers by Stamps. Geophysics of the Institute of Nevada-Reno, Beira Internal University in Portugal, and the Institute of Servan Observatory Ge Nantanario at the University of Antananarivo in Madagascar.

In one area, researchers found that the expansion is divided into a wider area. The area of ​​distribution, which stretches from East Africa to parts of Madagascar, is about 600 kilometers (372 miles) wide. More precisely, Madagascar is actively breaking up with central Madagascar with the Lavandal microplate – a small tectonic blue block with and a part of central Madagascar moving along the Somalian plate. Stamps added that the rest of the island is being unnecessarily distorted.

Geography Ph.D. Student Tahiri Rajaoniser, a former master’s student at the University of Madagascar Antananarivo. He helped Stamps in 2012 to collect the GPS data used in this study. He joined Virginia Tech in 2015 and later returned to Madagascar to collect more data as a lead on the National Geographic Society grant. “Leading a team to collect GPS data in Madagascar in the summer of 2017 was a wonderful field experience.”

The team used new surface motion data and additional geographic data to test different configurations of tectonic blocks in the region using computer models. Through an extensive suite of statistical tests, the researchers defined new boundaries for lavender microplates and Somalian plates. This approach is acceptable for testing if surface motion data are consistent with rigid plate motion.

Stamps said that precisely defining the boundaries of the plate and assessing whether the continents are developed in areas with severe deformities or through wide zones of diffuse deformation is crucial to unraveling the nature of the continents. “In this work, we have redefined how we are expanding the discrepancy of the world’s largest continents using the new GPS velocity solution.”

The discovery of the Broad Defoming Zone helps geologists understand the recent earthquakes and volcanic activity in the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean between East Africa and Madagascar. The study also provides a framework for future studies of global plate motion and the investigation of stamps and the forces driving plate tectonics for his team.