A New Ocean Is Forming in Africa

one day we on Twitter and come across this picture a new ocean is forming in Africa a 35 mile crack opened up in Ethiopia in 2005 wait what the African continent is breaking apart no way this can't be real or is it so we went down a rabbit hole what is happening here does this massive crack actually exist over the course of the last 6 months we tried to uncover the truth and ultimately we decided to make the journey to this place ourselves I'm walking on the edge of a new forming ocean of a splitting

continent turns out the story of how and why and where Africa is literally breaking is even more fascinating than we could have ever imagined [Music] as day one Vox fans this is our chance our own circle on the Sahara video well maybe not as mysterious but still we start our research and come across this photo again and again it could be Photoshop we inspect it and it doesn't seem to have obvious flaws but we are no experts by any means so we do a quick Google image search and even big Outlets like NBC use this

photo so it's at least unlikely that it's fake and there's a credit for Anthony Philpot as the photographer so we decide to look for him Anthony Philpot and we learned that he is jackpot a professor ameritus of geology and geophysics at the University of Connecticut at this point we are excited so we write him a message asking if he would be interested to do a video call with us we wait a few days and Professor Philpot really answers and he says no okay let's move on even though Phil Poots doesn't want to talk to us

he writes in his email that he is indeed the photographer and that he took the photo in the afar region of Ethiopia so the picture is real but what's the afar region uh the crack is located here we find out that it's often called the Bahu Fisher because it indeed opened in 2005 when the volcano DBU erupted this eruption must have been quite powerful on a website we read when erupted the afar's camels and goats were swallowed by huge flame sand Ash what in a paper a scientist writes 700 goats 200 camels and 70 donkeys

killed the volcanic ash and gases caused some issues for the locals but thankfully no one died only one person was injured but where exactly is the the bahoo Fisher if you search for it on Google Maps you only find a volcano not the Fisher itself and we can't spot it next to the volcano so we look for a new expert who has visited the afar region and find Dr Derek Kier he's an associate professor in earth science at the University of Southampton and has a really cool profile picture on his Twitter geologists really be Flex

in those lava pcks and this time we are lucky he agrees to talk to us Dr Kier visited the afar region about 20 times already it's basically positioned just north of dubu or or Northeast of du Bahu between the Bahu volcano and another volcano called gabo it's more or less directly in between the two I think gabo is about I don't know 20 10 or 20 kilm North of du Bahu uh so the vent site is is is about five or 10 kilometers north of dubu and I suppose in the in the literature the vent

is called daur is the name that's been used to for the specific vent because that's the the name that the local people use for the area all right such a big rift might be recognizable on satellite imagery on Google Maps we only see clouds so let's try to find it on Google Earth instead Ethiopia is huge it's five times bigger than the UK or about the size of Texas and California combined for our American audience okay here is the D Bahu volcano a little more North got it h just to watch it on Google Earth

ain't it we want to know more about this eruption and the opening of the vent Fisher and we kind of want to see it in real life so we search for ways to visit it but it isn't exactly a walk in the park it's in the middle of an active volcano territory after a while we come across action tours who offer a trip to the DBU Fisher Okay but who could fly to Ethiopia for us and go to this place naturally as YouTubers we never really leave our mom's basements so enter Valley woohoo he is

our former art director DUS go outside regularly and has been hitchhiking through the world since like 2 years of course I'm in I'm just in the middle of India right now valy is making the trip for us but it will take a little preparation if you travel a lot staying connected wherever you are is a must whether it's video calling your family or watching your favorite YouTuber before bed but dealing with local SIM cards in each country can be a real hassle for your next trip get an eim from s it works just like a

physical SIM card but it's digital giving you instant access to mobile data wherever you go s offers hundreds of flexible data packages in over 180 countries and eight regions around the world and the best part you manage it all in one app it's super easy to set up let's say you want to travel around India like Valley before you leave you download the s app choose a package that suits you and activate it once you arrive at your destination your esm automatically connects now you can hop between countries and always stay connected no matter if

you're here or here here or here if you want to try s scan this QR code or visit s.com ferntv and use the code ferntv to get 15% off your first purchase we can highly recommend it let's jump back to valy and his journey to Ethiopia I'm inside an Indian truck it's about 1:00 a.m. there's 2,000 km to go until chenai I have three more days to catch a flight to Ethiopia Adis Ababa and since they're my be more people watching than I'm used to I might want to do something about this treble goaty thing

hi guys let's go to Africa on July 17th Val takes the plane from chenai to Addis Ababa here valy meets mesan now he's from action tours and will help valy to get to the vent Fisher tomorrow they will fly from Adis Ababa to Samara there they will meet meet the rest of the team then they will drive with two cars into the desert and track 6 hours to the tahu Fisher it's a big bu flying and got must be crazy now we are getting up up up up Fly robing Fly robing Robin up up up

it's just like up while Valley and MSA now are on the PL to Samra let's take a closer look at the splitting of Africa the surface of our planet is always changing the formation of our continents as we know them began hundreds of millions of years ago with the supercontinent Pangia it was gigantic and encompassed almost all of Earth's land masses and was surrounded by a global ocean called panlasa until Pangia had an existential crisis and fell apart the shifting of the continent started slowly 1 mm per year and then picked up speed this can

be compared to the tearing of a rope it may start slowly but the last rope fibers suddenly tear very quickly the tectonic plates can reach speeds of up to 20 mm per year that is quite fast and roughly the speed of your fingernails growing when the plates move apart the Earth's crust becomes thinner a basin forms until the Earth n's crust breaks instead of seconds like an our visual this process takes a very long time it took over 40 million years for Africa and North America to separate and right now deep down it's happening again

this is the East African Rift system it's an active Continental Rift Zone it stretches over 6,000 km roughly from the edge of the Red Sea through Ethiopia to mosambique you can even see it from space it consists of a series of rift valleys it's currently the um the largest uh Continental Rift on Earth this Rift system is not a new phenomenon it all started millions of years ago over the past 30 million years the Arabian plate has been moving away from Africa the ground sank this created the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aiden along

the east African Rift the Somali plate and the Nubian plate are drifting away from each other where the tectonic plates move apart rift valleys form from the Red Sea the rifting extends Southward here the East African Rift system splits into two branches and Eastern and a Western Branch there the Eastern roof that runs more or less through Central Kenya and then uh the Western roof is s of running more or less on the border of several countries like Rwanda Bundi Uganda and then a major part part of that western part of the rift runs basically

right through the border of Tanzania and and the Congo the Democratic Republic of Congo and then between Tanzania and Zambia and then it sort of becomes one single Rift again when you get down to roughly maloi uh the roof sort of goes through um Malawi and then um into countries like mosm Beek and Botswana the rifting process also created three micro plates the Victoria played the Ruma play and the lro played along the Rifts is a lot of volcanic activity these forces are immensely powerful they once formed Mount Kilimanjaro in the north of Tanzania today

it is the highest mountain in Africa the East and West branches are very different Mountain massives like Mount kilamanjaro probably had a major influence on the climate they act as a barrier for clouds as a result you can find dry Landscapes and vast savanas in the East and rainforests and lakes in the west but this is the heart of the East African Rift system the afar region here three tectonic plates meet the Nubian or African plate the Arab plate and finally the Somali plate which is currently emerging basically Somalia is rotating in a clockwise direction

away from Nubia so the result of that is that the motion are faster in the north of roughly half a centimet per year some researchers believe that a super plume is responsible for the tectonic changes right now A mantle plume is an upwelling of hot rock material rising from deep in the Earth's mantle they look like a scary hot Mushroom and super plumes are the same thing but huge spreading over hundreds of kilometers a super plume beneath Africa is likely to cause the plates to move apart when the hot rock material spreads under the Earth's

crust it presses against the crust with so much force that it expands and eventually cracks open where ever the Earth's crust becomes thinner the land sinks here the ancient fractures and fall zones formed the current profile of the East African Rift Valley the afar region is one of the hottest places on Earth temperatures reach over 50° C in summer it's a very active volcanic territory it should be the void of life but it [Music] isn't after a few hours through the desert we've reached the first town on the first Village ter in the middle of

plain desert so it seems we have reached some kind of tourism office and they're having a meeting we have to wait until they're done with their [Music] meeting so we just collected Adam Adam he will help us navigate this volcano landscape I think we're asking for directions car is getting Fuller it's a huge news here 5 years ago there was no road for the vehicles it was only tracking about 6 hours track very monotonous exhaustion full of exhaustion but now they told me they have offro like this so the work maximum is about 30 minutes

so 30 minutes of walk nice today no way it's a huge news life is easy now man I was so ready to track for 6 hours no no 6 hours no need to tr yeah it's good news hours you can discover this [Music] area the tour goes on [Music] Valley and the action tour team have reached their destination we're seeing how far we can actually get towards the volcano they set up camp for the night and track the last meters to the Fisher young men with kalashnikov's walk with Valley sorry Whoever has to censor out

all these weapons Ethiopia is torn apart by internal conflicts and ethnic tensions T borders the AFA region a brutal deadly 2-year Civil War began here in 2020 and spread to the surrounding regions human rights violations and conflicts continue to this day carrying weapons has therefore become an essential part of daily life for many inhabitants of the afar [Music] region now they are only a few meters to go they're just standing on the edge over the Fisher W what wow don't go to the tip okay don't go to the tip incredible just watching the Earth literally

split into new parts I doubt it'll get across on video but with every step I take it feels like the Earth is actually somehow Hollow it makes a hollow kind of sound and everything vibrates if anyone around me takes a step this is it feels like I'm not walking on stable ground and there's this constant you hear this like rumbling all the time rumbling and like boiling of the earth it's a bit scary to be honest as if the Earth could swallow me any second this vent Fisher is about 500 M long but it is

only a small part what you can see from above is the 60 km long Dyke of solidified magma formed in the rift the 60 km crack is visible with using some satellite remote sensing techniques called insar basically it's it's a technique that looks at the the difference between um two radar satellite images that were collected before the Dyke and after the Dyke and was able to measure the ground motion that's been caused by the the dying you see evidence that either side of the rift have have separated by about 8 m or or so Val

is standing at the birthplace of a new ocean in 5 to 10 million years a new sea will form here the water will rush through the region and make its way should more or less go right through where the vent is because that is on the boundary between the two plates the Dyke and where the vent is is is on the boundary between the Arabian plate and the Nubian plate for the first time in human history people can document how a new ocean is born countries like Uganda and Zambia could one day have their own

coastlines but that's far from certain Dr Kier says it's possible that the forces won't be strong enough to split the continent completely in alha the thinking is basically that the Red Sea should continue a little bit further south into most of Afar and then afar will become part of the Red Sea and ultimately you have aort of a much bigger link between the Gulf of Aiden and the Red Sea neither us our children their children or their children to the power of X will witness what will actually happen but even today the afar region is

an exciting and fascinating place the East African Rift is the last It's the final remnant of this rifting process of of a supercontinent it's the last major roof you know there've been periods of time where there haven't been so many continents there been sort of one or two big continents now there's like a lot of them spread around the world so it's quite it's probably quite unusual you know in terms of the the geological history of the planet to have so many um little continents even aside from geology this place is special I feel like

these afar people they really embrace the spirit of the this place this place is nothing but impermanent ever changing all the time so quickly just like their homes around 2 million people live in afar most are nomads some of the last ones on Earth and pastoralists they often live from their goats camels and from Trading salt alar does have towns and cities but most of the people that live in the towns are from people from neighboring tribal are neighboring areas basically that they come there to to work and ran hotels and restaurants I mean there

are some afar people that do that as well but the majority are actually living in the countryside living a traditional lifestyle and they have you know typical their own language which is different from other parts of Ethiopia and they have their own dress they dress more kind of similar to um people from Arabia during his travel to the Fisher Valley met some locals and had the opportunity to see how they live [Music] time to get shiny okay goat milk goat goat butter mhm right from the volcano little bit sour boom boom and those big stones

rockes have been just shoot like Flying Star to another Mountain direction that time when it erupt there were AAR gos here they were just swall swallow by the fire and they were all dead thankfully the AF people has never been victims but animals their animals have been okay fired by that volcano every time every day I come here I see changes so soon or later I will expect even a big explosion around here and sometimes even there is movement here the RAR people are facing a number of challenges including recurring droughts disease outbreaks and conflicts

there's also a chronic water shortage so a far people use the volcanic activity to their advantage so in many parts of the rift especially around the Bahu there's no sort of permanent water sources like rivers or lake so but there is quite pure water that's um produced from the hydrothermal system so what people do is they they deliberately find kind of hot um Vents and ferals where there's water vapor being emitted from some of the fractures and faults near the volcano Val even visited these fascinating water constructions they just put some branches and the water

collects by itself they can just scoop it out during winter time now there's rain there's a lake nearby but during winter they use this water only fascinating we just spent the last few hours around the Bahu and now back back to the camp and man what a powerful place is this it marks the splitting of a continent the formation of a new ocean and much closer much closer to home much closer to humanity the playgrounds and the wasis for the local afar nads I'm so grateful that I get to be here probably less than a

handful of Outsiders have ever set a foot here wow I'm so grateful [Music]