"Africa, the land whose forbidding jungles and exotic wildlife sparked the wonder of outsiders for centuries, has one final mystery to reveal–and it's a whopper. Contradicting what scientists once thought they knew about the way landmasses and mountains form, the continent is being ripped apart.

It won't happen in a single cataclysmic event, but as surely as the snows fall on Kilimanjaro, future generations will look upon globes that show today's inland cities of Addis Ababa and Kampala as ports on a branch of the Indian Ocean. All of Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya and Tanzania, and parts of Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, Malawi and Mozambique will form a new island-continent of their own. Simply put, Africa is splitting in two".

"In East Africa, spreading processes have already torn Saudi Arabia away from the rest of the African continent, forming the Red Sea. The actively splitting African Plate and the Arabian Plate meet in what geologists call a triple junction, where the Red Sea meets the Gulf of Aden. A new spreading center may be developing under Africa along the East African Rift Zone. When the continental crust stretches beyond its limits, tension cracks begin to appear on the Earth's surface. Magma rises and squeezes through the widening cracks, sometimes to erupt and form volcanoes.

The rising magma, whether or not it erupts, puts more pressure on the crust to produce additional fractures and, ultimately, the rift zone.

East Africa may be the site of the Earth's next major ocean. Plate interactions in the region provide scientists an opportunity to study first hand how the Atlantic may have begun to form about 200 million years ago. Geologists believe that, if spreading continues, the three plates that meet at the edge of the present-day African continent will separate completely, allowing the Indian Ocean to flood the area and making the easternmost corner of Africa (the Horn of Africa) a large island" (USGS).