
Africa 'witnessing birth of a new ocean' (2010) - niccolop
http://www.bbc.com/news/10415877
======
WildUtah
Americans don't need to travel so far to see an ocean being born. The block-
fault zone from the Sea of Cortez up through most of Nevada is pulling apart
rapidly and has already created 500 miles of inlet between Baja California and
mainland Mexico.

Much of the next few hundred miles north through the Salton Sea and Death
Valley is already under sea level and all of Nevada has thinning crust that
will eventually fall under sea level.

in fact, most of the valleys in Nevada, in spite of typical elevations around
4000 feet, are already below sea level. It's just that they presently don't
have any outlet to the sea in the Great Basin so alluvium has collected as the
fault-block mountains created by spreading erode. [0] When a river has a
chance to cut down through that soft debris, the valley floors will quickly
drop below sea level also.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_block#Fault-
block_mounta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_block#Fault-
block_mountains)

~~~
nugget
How can a place be simultaneously 4k elevation and also "presently below sea
level"? Are you saying that the introduction of sea water would rapidly erode
4k ft of surface material?

~~~
tangus
Yes, AIUI, he's saying bedrock is under sea level and is covered by 4000 ft of
easily erodable material.

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vermontdevil
TL;DR a split in Ethiopia is about 65km long. It'll eventually split the
African Continent in 10 million years. Hold off the oceanfront land
speculation.

Article is from 2010 btw.

~~~
notyourwork
> Article is from 2010 btw.

Thank you for pointing this out. I find a tendency to not seek out date of
publish and assume content from places like hackernews is current. From 2010
feels a lot less like current events which is part of what I read the front
page here.

New years resolution is to check dates and sources of articles, thanks!

~~~
bcraven
I'm seeing the title listed on HN as "Africa 'witnessing birth of a new ocean'
(2010) (bbc.com)"

Is this something only I can see, or was it edited since your comment?

~~~
igravious
Their comment is from 10 hours ago. New feature proposal for HN, little
_edited_ label/flag next to titles that have been changed by the mods.

------
finid
To anybody from the BBC reading this, please, please, with an article like
this, a map tells more than a thousand words. I'm very familiar with the Afar
Triangle, but please, include a map with an article like this in the future.

Thank you.

------
mmanfrin
A single inlet, attached to the Red Sea -- wouldn't this be a _Sea_ and not an
_Ocean_?

Also a story like this without a map is very annoying; my best guess as to
where it is is here:

[https://www.google.com/maps/@10.1384475,40.4893819,818636a,2...](https://www.google.com/maps/@10.1384475,40.4893819,818636a,20y,26.6t/data=!3m1!1e3)

~~~
btilly
The Earth has a continental drift cycle where we form a supercontinent, which
changes the circulation pattern, the supercontinent breaks up, the pieces
drift around the world, and then recombine into a supercontinent again.

The last supercontinent was Pangea Asia, Europe and Africa are what is left
and they are continuing to break up. The next one will meet where the Pacific
plate now is.

So this starts as a rift, then a valley, then an inlet, then that will widen
into an ocean, and then the barriers between oceans will disappear.

So yes, this will be a sea before it is an ocean. But it is also correct to
talk about it as the birth of a new ocean. (The Red Sea is also on its way to
being an ocean. It is just farther along. And the Atlantic is farther along
still.)

~~~
samplatt
Isn't it a bit early to be calling it a cycle? I mean, we've not even
completed one full iteration yet.

Unless I'm wrong, and the tectonic plates existed and were moving long before
the oceans did?

~~~
bcraven
No we have plenty of evidence of previous cycles. It's called the Wilson
Cycle:

[http://csmres.jmu.edu/geollab/Fichter/Wilson/Wilson.html](http://csmres.jmu.edu/geollab/Fichter/Wilson/Wilson.html)

For further reading I can recommend 'Supercontinent' by Ted Nield.

------
maxxxxx
We should set up a webcam there and make a time lapse for the next 10 million
years.

~~~
beamatronic
We do have satellites - I don't know about 10 million years but it seems
reasonable to assume that humans will maintain satellites in orbit for imaging
purposes as long as we are technologically able.

~~~
djsumdog
How long do you think humans will be around? Sure, homosapiens have been here
for like 2~3 million years, right? But out modern human civilizations are very
young, like ~ 10,000 years at the most (depending on your metrics and what is
a civilization).

To quote Blade Running, "the flame that burns twice as bright burns half as
long." We could be here another million years, or we could be here only 50,000
more years .. or 5 year or 5 days, if Dr. Strangelove gets his way.

~~~
maxxxxx
I bet in 10 million years we'll be totally gone or somewhere in a computer. I
doubt we'll still bother with physical bodies.

~~~
prewett
Assuming it is possible (which I don't think), would you really want to be a
disembodied computer program?

(Being in a robot doesn't count, since you'd merely be exchanging one body for
another.)

[The following is intended philosophically, not religiously] There is an old,
I believe Jewish, tradition that demons are spirits without a body. Their
whole goal is to regain a body (hence demonic possession). In one
interpretation of Mark 5, when Jesus tells the demons to leave the Gerasene
man, they ask for permission to go into the pigs nearby. [1] I guess a pig
body is better than none (but it doesn't work, the pigs rush off the cliff and
drown, leaving the demons bodyless again).

I've thought about that interpretation over the years as a philosophical
exercise. If you are only spirit and no body, then maybe you cannot interact
with the world. That would be a bummer... You'd be stuck trying to get spirits
with bodies to use them for you.

So if you are a disembodied computer program, how would you see? How would you
communicate? How would you repair yourself? How would you influence world
events? You'd be stuck experiencing things vicariously, by snooping on Google
images and people's FB accounts and reading their emails, and hacking their
computers/Google glass/VR/cars/robots. If you couldn't find someone to do your
bidding willingly, you would have to start manipulating people to get them to
do what you want. You manipulate people through fear and through temptation.
All this is starting to sound rather demonic. You'd end up as a digital
demon...

[1]
[https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+5&version=...](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+5&version=NIV)

~~~
mulmen
Interesting take that I had not considered. I was not familiar with the story
from Mark. I have thought about this topic as well but from a completely
different direction.

My question about uploading consciousness is in the transition point. As I sit
here in front of my computer could I click a button and upload my memories and
consciousness to a computer? Would they for some reason leave my body at the
same time? Would it be instantly fatal? Why?

Wouldn't I really just be forking my consciousness? One version of me would
continue forward inside a computer with the memory of the transition and the
corporeal me would continue wondering if it even worked. The corporeal me
would still die at some point but I could die with the satisfaction(?) that I
created a copy of myself at some point in time.

I'm not sure that's much different than writing a book and having children.

~~~
pluma
There's no reason to believe anything happens with your consciousness if you
"upload" it to a computer.

There's no reason to believe we'll find a way to _transfer_ the consciousness
rather than make a copy of it (or something that is indistinguishable from it
to an outside observer).

When you upload your consciousness, you're left behind to die. When you use a
transporter, the transporter kills you. Your consciousness ends with your
body. Lt Barclay in Star Trek was right to be afraid of the cloning death
machines.

The question, I guess is, whether the knowledge that an exact replica of
yourself will live on for eternity is good enough for you. Or whether you're
religious enough to forego our understanding of the physical world and believe
in the existence of a non-physical "soul" that will automatically attach
itself to the copy when the host is destroyed (though this creates all kinds
of questions if the host isn't instantly destroyed during the process of the
"upload").

------
rwbhn
Here is a map:
[https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/East_Africa.html](https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/East_Africa.html)

~~~
oska
Also:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afar_Triangle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afar_Triangle)

~~~
tim333
And a video going 25m years into the future [https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/Plate-
Tectonics/Chap3-Plate-Margi...](https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/Plate-
Tectonics/Chap3-Plate-Margins/Divergent/Triple%20Junction)

------
soyiuz
A map would be extremely useful to illustrate the process (instead of a
picture of dirt). I am also not clear as to why the new waterway would be
considered a "new ocean." Would it not just form a strait or at most a sea as
a part of the Indian Ocean?

~~~
prewett
It's so new that it isn't big enough to be an ocean yet. But if you wait a
while, you'll see...

------
Anm
Another article from 2013 reports conflicting evidence:
[http://www.livescience.com/39724-afar-rift-deep-mantle-
melt....](http://www.livescience.com/39724-afar-rift-deep-mantle-melt.html)

~~~
dragonwriter
Actually, no, that article reports differences between the EAR and mature
ocean spreading centers, but that is not evidence which conflicts with the
idea that it is a nascent spreading center.

------
adamcharnock
"parts of the region are below sea level and the ocean is only cut off by
about a 20-metre block of land in Eritrea."

This caught my eye. How big is this region that is just 20m away from being
flooded? And 20m of Eritrea at that. Not exactly comparable IMHO to the rather
more politically stable Netherlands.

~~~
drinkjuice
Assuming this map is somewhat accurate, it seems like even just 1m would make
most of the difference for that country:

[http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/](http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/)

------
zeristor
"It will pull apart, sink down deeper and deeper and eventually... parts of
southern Ethiopia, Somalia will drift off, create a new island, and we'll have
a smaller Africa and a very big island that floats out into the Indian Ocean."

This sounds like the sequel to Madagascar

------
tossaway1
> The researchers say that they are extremely lucky to be able to witness the
> birth of this ocean as the process is normally hidden beneath the seas.

What??? The birth of oceans usually happens "beneath the seas"...?

~~~
bcraven
Oceanic crust vs continental crust

------
finid
If that part of Africa splits from the rest of the continent, it will just be
like Madagascar, which has been drifting away from Africa since we started
noticed.

~~~
bcraven
Madagascar and Mozambique may be on different plates but they're actually
separated by the Davie Ridge, a transform zone. You can see it nicely imaged
in the seismic in this report:

[http://www.iongeo.com/content/documents/Resource%20Center/Ar...](http://www.iongeo.com/content/documents/Resource%20Center/Articles/GXPRO_East_Africa_120904.pdf)

Then again, this zone does end up in the East African Triple Junction so you
are technically correct.

------
spiderfarmer
Why do articles related to geography and archeology always come with just one
picture?

------
tabris
>10 million years in the future

Well you can get away with making any prediction this way

~~~
bcraven
As a geologist this is exactly the sort of timescale we work on.

