A new ocean could form in Africa as the continent continues to split apart.

Yahoo.com writes about it.

According to the researchers, the rift formed in the Ethiopian desert, creating an opportunity for Kenya and Uganda to develop a coastline as a new ocean formed in the rift.

"This is the only place on Earth where you can study how a continental rift becomes an oceanic rift. We can see oceanic crust starting to form because it is markedly different from continental crust in terms of composition and density," said University of Leeds PhD student Christopher Moore .

The 56km-long rift, known as the East African Rift, formed in 2005, but any new ocean development will take 5 to 10 million years, researchers say.

"The Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea will flood over the Afar region and the East African Rift Valley and become a new ocean, and this part of East Africa will become its own small continent," said marine geophysicist Ken McDonald.

The cause of the split remains unknown, but some researchers believe that the formation of the fault was caused by tectonic processes similar to those that occur on the ocean floor.

The fault is located on the border of three tectonic plates - Somali, Nubian and Arabian.

They move away from each other by several millimeters per year.

We will remind, scientists of the University of East Anglia are horrified by the increase in the number of

deadly carnivorous bacteria

.

According to scientists, the number of Vibrio vulnificus will double in the coming decades.

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