A huge rift is slowly tearing apart Africa, the second largest continent. According to the Geological Society of London, this depression, known as the East African Rift, is a network of valleys that stretches about 2,175 miles (3,500 kilometers) from the Red Sea to Mozambique.

So will Africa be completely disintegrated, and if so, when? To answer this question, let’s look at the region’s tectonic plates, the outer portions of the planet’s surface that can collide with each other to form mountains or break apart to form large basins. Along this massive rift in East Africa, the Somali tectonic plate protrudes eastward from the Nubian tectonic plate, a larger, older part of the continent, according to NASA’s Earth Observatory.

The Somali and Nubian plates are also separating from the Arabian plate towards the north. The Geological Society of London states that these plates intersect in Ethiopia’s Afar region, forming a Y-shaped rift system.

“The East African rift began forming about 35 million years ago between Arabia and the Horn of Africa in the continent’s east,” said Cynthia Ebinger, a research associate and scientific scientist in the Department of Geology at Tulane University in New Orleans. Advisor to the US Department of State’s Office of African Affairs. This rift eventually spread southward and reached northern Kenya 25 million years ago.

A rift consists of two widely parallel groups of faults in the Earth’s crust. The Geological Society of London noted that the fault in the east passed through Ethiopia and Kenya, while the fault in the west spread from Uganda to Malawi. According to NASA’s Earth Observatory, the eastern branch is arid, while the western branch borders the Congo rainforest.

Ebinger said the presence of eastern and western rifts and the discovery of offshore earthquake and volcanic regions indicate that Africa is slowly opening along several lines of more than 0.25 inches (6.35 millimeters) per year.

“Right now, in relation to the growth rate of toenails, cleavage happens very slowly,” said Ken MacDonald, a distinguished earth science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. On the map you can see the boundaries of the tectonic plates (grey) and the East African Rift zone (dashed lines).

According to the Geological Society of London, the East African Rift most likely formed due to heat flowing from the asthenosphere (the warmer, weaker upper part of Earth’s mantle) between Kenya and Ethiopia. This heat caused the upper crust to expand and rise and the brittle continental rock to stretch and break. NASA’s Earth Observatory said this led to significant volcanic activity, including the formation of Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain.

There are different ideas about how this could happen if Africa breaks up. In one scenario, most of the Somali plate is separated from the rest of the African continent and a sea forms between them. According to Ebinger, this new landmass will include Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti and eastern parts of Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique. “Another scenario envisions the separation of only eastern Tanzania and Mozambique,” said Ebinger.

Ebinger said that if the African continent were to break apart, “the Ethiopian and Kenyan rifts could separate and form the Somali plate in the next 1 to 5 million years.”

But Africa cannot be divided in two. The geological forces driving the rift may have been too slow to separate the Somali and Nubian plates, according to Ebinger. According to a 2022 review in GSA Today, a notable example of a failed fault anywhere in the world is the Mid-Continent Fault, which bends for nearly 1,900 miles (3,000 km) along the upper Midwest of North America.