The Great Rift Valley

 

Like a scar running along the face of eastern Africa, the Great Rift Valley stretches for  3,700 miles from the Red Sea in the north into the country of Mozambique in the south.

The Great Rift Valley is a pretty amazing place. It is Africa's most mountainous terrain, including Mt. Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest peak. Famous natural sites bring tourists on safari to places like the Serengeti, the world's largest plain; you may have seen it in a little film called the Lion King.

 

On these plains, thought to be the birthplace of humanity, some of the oldest humanoid fossils in the world have been found here, including Lucy (no, not the one who pulls the football from under Charlie Brown). These early homanids evolved into the modern day homo sapien. (To get a good look at this creature look in the mirror).

 

The Great Rift Valley is being formed by the movement of tectonic plates, the same process that created the Himalayan Mountains in Asia. But, put this process in reverse. Rather than plate collision, it is plate separation that is creating the rift. Africa is literally being pulled apart as the Africa plate is breaking into two separate plates, a very rare occurrence.

If you stay up late, for the next 10 million years or so, you will witness a redrawing of the African map (assuming they have maps that far in the future). East Africa will have broken away from the continent forming its own subcontinent.

 

This process is responsible for creating Africa's Great Lakes like Lake Victoria, Lake Tanganyika, Lake Albert, Lake Kivu, Lake Turkana, and Lake Malawi, which are basically big holes in the ground filled with water. These lakes are the starting point of East Africa's great rivers like the mighty Nile, which starts in Lake Victoria and runs northward to the Mediterranean Sea.

Another cool water feature is Victoria Falls, the world's largest, can be found along the Zambezi River that forms a border between Zambia and Zimbabwe. These falls are known in the language of the locals as Mosi-Oa-Tunya, "The Smoke that Thunders".