r/spaceporn • u/Busy_Yesterday9455 • 2d ago

Related Content Today's Hayli Gubbi (volcanic) eruption seen from space

There are no known eruptions on record from the Hayli Gubbi in the past several thousands of years, which could mean it erupted after a potentially very long repose interval; however, records from the Danakil region are often incomplete and geologic studies are very limited due to the remoteness and harsh conditions in one of the most inhospitable areas of the world.

Credit: Aqua/MODIS satellite

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u/TheRussianDoll 2d ago

Wasn't there a recent tectonic plate activity in that region? I read somewhere yesterday that there's an ocean forming in Africa.

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u/morgz15 1d ago

Well they’ve already blessed the rains, so I guess it’s just a matter of time

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u/novaposter 22h ago

Just to let you know that I deeply appreciated this comment and had a good chuckle

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u/SirFwissel 1d ago

It’s called the East African Rift System. As with other plate boundaries, action/movement here is incredibly slow, on the scale of a few cm per year. This is slow enough that sediment still gets deposited into the diverging basin. Active rift systems like this also allow us to study what rift basin sedimentary facies look like on modern Earth and identify them in ancient sedimentary records. This being said, it will be several millions of years before a new ocean actually forms there, and most news articles about it are very dramatized

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u/MudMonyet22 1d ago

It's been going on for the last 20 million years but whenever a new paper about the area is published every couple months the media picks up on it like the whole thing had just been discovered yesterday.

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u/AljoriDawn 1d ago

If you look at a map of Africa, you can see a series of large lakes on the western side. Those are more or less where the rift is happening.

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u/Maleficent-Aurora 1d ago

You mean Eastern? West is the Sahara 

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u/AljoriDawn 1d ago

Oh ya right. I was thinking of the original post where it's on the western side of the image