MOSES parted the Red Sea nice and smoothly, according to biblical accounts. The rupture of the Earth’s crust in the Afar depression, at the southern end of the Red Sea, however, is not proceeding so calmly. Magma is pushing the ground apart as the African tectonic plate moves away from the Arabian plate.
Tim Wright, of the University of Oxford, and his colleagues used the European Space Agency’s Envisat radar satellite to monitor the uneven rift. In September 2005 they observed a sudden 8-metre widening in the Afar region of Ethiopia, accompanied by small earthquakes and a volcanic eruption.
The…
