On land, giant troughs such as the Great Rift Valley in Africa form where plates are tugged apart. If the plates there continue to diverge, millions of years from now eastern Africa will split ...

Different plate tectonic settings produce distinctive basin environments where sedimentary ... sedimentary rocks will also be deposited within the rift valley. At first the rift valley will be ...

As the Somali Plate gradually drifts eastward and the ... it took over 30 million years for the Earth’s crust in the rift valley to thin from “40 to 35 kilometers (25 miles), so it will ...

A new ocean is slowly forming in East Africa as the African, Arabian, and Somali plates drift apart. This geological shift, ...

Running along the top of this chain of mountains is a deep crack, called a rift valley. It is here that ... At the East Pacific rise, which is pushing a plate into the west coast of South America ...