Birth of an Ocean

The Afar triangle is a 40,000-sq.-mi. portion of northeast Ethiopia that lies at the juncture of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. It is a land of jagged mountains and cliffs, treacherous earth faults, active volcanoes and below-sea-level deserts where temperatures rise to a scorching 134DEGF. in the shade. Its only inhabitants are fierce nomads, one of whose reputed customs is to carve parts from battle victims and bear them home as trophies for their women. Yet the most awesome aspect of this Dantean terrain is the inferno that may be hidden beneath it. After three recent expeditions to the Afar triangle, a Belgian volcanologist named Haroun Tazieff concludes that subterranean forces may slowly transform the area into a section of a large new ocean.

Many scientists have long thought that the region's unusually harsh landscape was one more puzzle connected with the peculiar geological formations of East Africa's Great Rift Valley, a 3,000-mile series of breaks in the earth's surface, which stretches as far south as the mouth of the Zambesi River. To Tazieff, however, it is an illustration of a more intriguing phenomenon: continental drift. After years of debate, scientists have finally become convinced that the earth's huge land masses are really moving. As they see it, lava is pouring out of a 47,000-mile-long chain of volcanically active ridges that cut through the oceans. The lava spreads from the undersea rifts and carries the continents along with it (TIME, Jan. 5).

An earth scientist's dreamland, Afar sits at the meeting place of three such giant rift systems. Two of these cleave the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, and geophysicists think that both bodies of water are gradually being widened into oceans at the rate of perhaps an inch or so a year as the lava pours out of the rifts.

Tazieff contends that the Afar triangle is, geologically speaking, a section of the expanding floor of the Red Sea. That floor, he says, has been uplifted by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other activity linked with lava flows from the Red Sea rift--whose axis has somehow been displaced slightly westward in the area of the triangle (see diagram). But the uplifting is only temporary, he writes in Scientific American. Only tens of thousands of years ago, a fleeting moment by geological standards, the Afar triangle was partially covered with seawater. As the Red Sea continues to widen and the subsurface rumbling goes on, he says, Afar will again vanish from sight beneath the waves.

Free Power. Not all scientists are willing to accept the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden as embryonic oceans. But Ta-zieff's evidence is highly persuasive. For one thing, much of the rock that his expeditions gathered in the area is younger and heavier than typical land rocks, and bears other similarities to specimens found on the ocean floor. For another, the desert regions of the Afar triangle are covered with a thick layer of evap-orites, the salty debris left behind after seawater evaporates. Tazieff and his colleagues also found distinct traces of coral in the area's lava beds, plus a Stone Age ax that was actually encrusted with seashells--a sign that the relic was once covered by seas.

Before the Afar triangle sinks back into the depths--an event that Tazieff reassuringly says is still a considerable time off--the region could enjoy unmatched prosperity. Because it is so geologically active, he speculates that underground fields of superheated water and steam lie just below the desert floor. If Ethiopia and her neighbors tapped this free source of power, they could produce millions of kilowatt hours of electricity at extremely low cost. The electricity could then be used to support large new industries--aluminum, fertilizers and petrochemicals. Thus, one of the world's most forbidding regions might be turned into an area of unbounded prosperity--at least for the foreseeable geological future.

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