By Valentine Amanze, Online Editor
Nature is gradually and steadily breaking Madagascar, African island nation, into smaller islands.
Also Africa, as a continent, is not spared by the natural occurrence.
Scientists, who have been monitoring the country’s environment of late, said that in prehistoric times – 88 million years ago – Madagascar, the island country in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa, split off from the Indian subcontinent.
The gradual splitting of the African continent along the eastern region has been a major geological subject centred on the East African Rift system, according to Reuters report.
Reuters also revealed that several reports on the rift system have described how the continent is breaking apart to form a new ocean at the volcanic “Y” junction of the Afar region in Ethiopia.
The “large crack” which appeared in Kenya, a country where the rift is well displayed, led to more questions about the African continent splitting into two.
While the East African rift system is thought to stretch from the Afar region of Ethiopia down south to Mozambique in a new study, scientists are saying the splitting is “more complex and more distributed than previously thought”.
It has been found that the rift system extends further down to the island of Madagascar which is also currently slowly breaking apart.
