Africa’s Afar region
gives glimpses of
geology in action
By Alexandra Witze
To those who live there, east Afri- ca’s Afar region is “the place the devil plows.” One of the hottest and lowest areas on Earth, it is
a landscape of baking desert and barren
lava flows. To scientists, though, Afar
means something more promising: geol-
ogy in the raw.
Until then, researchers have a front
seat to an unparalleled physical spectacle. “It’s a really unique opportunity
to understand how continents break
apart,” says Tim Wright, a remote-sensing expert at the University of Leeds
in England. Wright leads a large international consortium that began studying
the region in 2005, when the splitting
picked up pace.
Afar’s geological violence comes in
many forms. Magma welling up from
the depths sometimes erupts through
existing volcanoes. Other times it pools
