The crust under Africa is thinning in a way that hasn’t been seen before

The crust under Africa is thinning in a way that hasn't been seen before Skip to content Subscribe today Every print subscription comes with full digital access Subscribe Now By Katherine Kornei May 13, 2026 at 10:00 am Share this: Share Share via email (Opens in new window) Email Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit Share on X (Opens in new window) X Print (Opens in new window) Print Listen to this article This is a human-written story voiced by AI. Got feedback? Take our survey . (See our AI policy here .) It’s a bit of a stretch, but the analogy works. Sometimes Earth’s tectonic plates pull apart from one another like taffy. In eastern Africa, that taffy is already thin and weak, and the tugging forces are concentrated in certain spots. The Turkana Rift Zone is undergoing “necking,” a critical transition toward continental breakup that has never been observed before, researchers reported April 23 in Nature Communications . The region may be closer to splitting, and doing so faster, than scientists once thought, the data suggest. The Turkana Rift Zone straddles Kenya and Ethiopia, and it is best known for its wealth of fossils of our human ancestors . “Scientists were initially drawn there for its world-famous hominin fossil record,” says Christian Rowan, a geoscientist at Columbia University. But the rocks beneath the Turkana Rift Zone hold their own secrets. Rowan and his colleagues used a suite of archival data, including acoustic-based measurements originally collected to explore oil and gas resources, to take a look beneath the surface. By sending acoustic waves into the planet and measuring how they’re reflected, it’s possible to create images of what’s underground, Rowan says. “It’s almost like an ultrasound of the upper crust.” The team focused on a layer of metamorphic rocks beneath the planet’s surface. Those old, hard rocks form the Earth’s continental crust, with the stuff we think of as the