Is Africa cracking open? How Earth’s ‘heartbeat’ is tearing the continent apart, forming a new ocean

A strong, steady pulse has been found deep beneath Africa, moving like a heartbeat.

This slow movement is gradually pulling the continent apart and could one day lead to the birth of a new ocean.

That is what a group of researchers from around the world have said after studying the crust and mantle beneath Ethiopia’s Afar region.

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In areas where tectonic plates pull away from each other, the land stretches and becomes thinner. Over millions of years, it can break apart and form a new ocean basin.

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In this explainer, we look at what the new study shows, what the researchers found, and how this could change the continent.

What does the study say?

Researchers from the University of Southampton have found a steady, rhythmic pulse deep under Ethiopia’s Afar region, similar to a human heartbeat.

This pulse is caused by molten magma pushing against the Earth’s crust from below. Over time, this is slowly splitting the continent, and could eventually lead to the formation of a new ocean.

To understand this process, the team collected over 130 samples of volcanic rock from the Afar region and the Main Ethiopian Rift. They also used existing data and advanced statistical models to study the crust and mantle beneath the surface.

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For a long time, geologists believed that a hot column of rising material known as a mantle plume lay beneath Afar, helping pull the crust apart. But until now, the structure of this plume and how it behaves during rifting was not clearly understood.

Emma Watts, lead author of the study and a geologist who worked on the research while at the University of Southampton, explained: “We found that the mantle beneath Afar is not uniform or stationary—it pulses—and these pulses carry distinct chemical signatures.

These ascending pulses of partially molten mantle are channelled by the rifting plates above. That’s important for how we think about the interaction between Earth’s interior and its surface."

The study showed that the mantle plume under Afar contains chemical bands that repeat across the rift system, like a geological barcode. The spacing of these bands changes depending on the conditions in each section of the rift.

The research was a joint effort by experts from 10 institutions, including the University of Southampton, Swansea University, Lancaster University, the Universities of Florence and Pisa, GEOMAR in Germany, the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Addis Ababa University, and the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences.

Professor Tom Gernon, a co-author of the study and Earth Science expert at the University of Southampton, said: “The chemical striping suggests the plume is pulsing, like a heartbeat.” He added that the way these pulses behave depends on how thick the crust is and how quickly it is moving apart.

The findings show that the plume under Afar is not fixed but reacts to the movement of the tectonic plates above.

The study, published in Nature Geoscience on June 25, explains how these plates affect the upward flow of hot mantle material. As the continent continues to split, a new ocean basin is taking shape, with seafloor spreading expected to continue along the entire rift over millions of years.

With the first phase of research complete, the team will now focus on studying how the mantle is flowing beneath the surface and how fast it is moving.

Is the continent splitting faster than expected?

In January, Ken Macdonald, a professor at the University of California, said that the continent appeared to be breaking apart more quickly than previously thought.

According to him, Somalia, along with parts of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania, could eventually separate from the rest of Africa, forming a new landmass with its own coastline.

“What might happen is that the waters of the Indian Ocean would come in and flood what is now the East African Rift Valley,” Professor Macdonald told DailyMail.

Although cracks are already visible along the rift, scientists believe it will still take several million years before the continent completely splits apart.