Yesterday there was a news that scientists are now saying that a new ocean is slowly forming in Africa and in a few thousand years Africa will be completely split in half, changing the shape of the world as we know it. The surprise here, though, is not that our ancestral cradle is being cleaved in half but rather that it has been going on for about 25 million years and also that it is directly responsible for our existence (sort of).
So, the ocean that’s been forming doesn’t even have salt water… yet. The reason that I mentioned salt is because of the multitude of rivers that run through the Rift Valley’s various cracks and gorges. The East African Rift Valley is the base structure of the new ocean that is a network of cracks across the surface of Africa. By cracks, I mean anything from an abnormally narrow and deep ditch to large canyons stretching for kilometers. This giant hole in the earth’s crust started forming 20 million years ago in the Miocene period, when most of Africa was a hot and humid jungle and monkeys had a blast, with plenty of different species including the first apes.
Over time, the rift increased and by ten million years ago there was a major divide. During this time, climate change started to make changes in the landscape, turning the once-jungle into a sparse woodland and finally into a savanna. This led to the apes being forced to become more and more upright and to be more resourceful in finding food, such as using stone tools to break bones. Normally, genetic flow between populations like these apes that would’ve moved around a lot would have limited or at least slowed evolution. However, the Rift Valley removed a lot of chance for contact with our cousins in the trees, and fast forward 8 million years later to now and we have totally different chimpanzees and humans. Of course, there are a bunch of other more important factors, but it’s still a bit ironic that something that basically forced us to evolve is still gonn affect us in the future.
Anay Ganesh 