April 14, 2011
Here I am, Africa. My exact location is at 1° 10’ 51” N and 36° 6’ 15” E. I am in Kapedo, a tiny little town in Kenya. It is so hot here, I don’t want to move, but I have a trip planned for today. I am going to go to a crater in the area. I heard about it at the travel office and tried to figure out some more about it. Apparently it is part of the East African Rift, which is a sub-portion of the Great Rift Valley. It was created by a divergent boundary between the African Plate and the Arabian Plate.
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| The divergent boundary in Africa: |
This means that those two plates are moving apart from each other. When this happens, a gap opens up in between them. New lava from the earth’s core bubbles up through this crack and forms new rocks a bit below the original ground level. This new rock continues to push the tectonic plates out more, and so a valley or a crater-like fissure appears in the ground.
Strangely, there haven’t been very many earthquakes in Kenya or in the surrounding area. There are a few volcanoes though. Since the divergent boundary causes magma to bubble up, and this is what an eruption is, there have been a few eruptions in Kenya, although not in the last few decades. The most recent eruption was in 1921, and the oldest recorded eruption was in 6550 BCE.
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| The Barrier Volcano: What is also currently happening in this area is that the East African Rift is causing the African plate to split into two new plates. They have been named the Somali Plate and the Nubian Plate. The two new plates are being formed, because the lava that is bubbling up at the divergent boundary is putting so much stress on the African plate that it is beginning to crack. I need to get ready for my trip to go see the crater, if I want to make it back to town before midnight. I will let you know how my excursion went in my next post. J |
I liked your pictures! they made it easier to understand the stuff in your post!
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