. The Great Rift Valley is a huge fracture in the crust of the earth in the eastern part of Africa. Crustal rifts are found all over the world, but the one in East Africa is the largest. The rift is a complex series of faultlines that runs from the Red Sea down into Mozambique. The Lake Turkana basin in the rift region is known as the 'Cradle of Mankind' and has been a source of hominid fossils since the 1970s.

Rift definition, an opening made by splitting, cleaving, etc.; fissure; cleft; chink. Definition of rift-valley noun in Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Meaning, pronunciation, picture, example sentences, grammar, usage notes, synonyms and more. F1 2014 game download free pc. We use cookies to enhance your experience on our website, including to provide targeted advertising and track usage.

A 2019 paper suggests that the Kenyan and Ethiopian rifts are evolving into one single oblique rift. The Rift Valley is the result of an ancient series of faults, rifts, and volcanoes deriving from the shifting of at the junction between the Somalian and the African plates. Scholars recognize two branches of the GRV: the eastern half—which is that piece north of Lake Victoria that runs NE/SW and meets the Red Sea; and the western half—running nearly N/S from Victoria to the Zambezi river in Mozambique. The eastern branch rifts first occurred 30 million years ago, the western 12.6 million years ago. In terms of rift evolution, many parts of the Great Rift Valley are in different stages, from pre-rift in the, to initial-rift stage at the Malawi rift; to typical-rift stage in the northern Tanganyika rift region; to advanced-rift stage in the Ethiopian rift region; and finally to oceanic-rift stage in the. The Eastern African Rift Valley is a long valley flanked by uplifted shoulders that step down to the central rift by more or less parallel faults.

The main valley is classed as a continental rift, extending from 12 degrees north to 15 degrees south of our planet's​. It extends a length of 3,500 km and intersects major portions of the modern countries of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, and Mozambique and minor portions of others. The width of the valley varies between 30 km to 200 km (20-125 mi), with the widest section at the northern end where it links to the Red Sea in the Afar region of Ethiopia. The depth of the valley varies across eastern Africa, but for most of its length it is more than 1 km (3280 feet) deep and at its deepest, in Ethiopia, it is over 3 km (9,800 ft) deep. The topographical steepness of its shoulders and the depth of the valley have created specialized microclimates and hydrology within its walls. Most rivers are short and small within the valley, but a few follow the rifts for hundreds of kilometers, discharging into deep lake basins.

The valley acts as a north-south corridor for the migration of animals and birds and inhibits east/west movements. When glaciers dominated most of Europe and Asia during the, the rift lake basins were havens for animals and plant life, including early. Following on the mid- to late-19th-century work of dozens of explorers including the famous, the concept of an East African rift fracture was established by Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, and named the Great Rift Valley of East Africa in 1896 by British geologist John Walter Gregory. In 1921, Gregory described the GRV as a system of graben basins which included the valleys of the Red and in western Asia, as the Afro-Arabian rift system.

Gregory's interpretation of the GRV formation was that two faults had opened up and a central piece dropped down forming the valley (called a ). The interior of the rift valley was isolated from the rest of Africa during the and sheltered freshwater lakes located in savannahs. As with other animals, our early ancestors may have found refuge there when the ice covered much of the planet and then evolved as hominids within its tall shoulders. An interesting study on the genetics of frog species by Freilich and colleagues showed that the valley's micro-climates and topography are at least, in this case, a biogeographic barrier that resulted in the splitting of the species into two separate gene pools. Blinkhorn, J., and M. Quaternary Science Reviews 195 (2018): 1–20. Print.

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