Qualla: Red Sea Rift https://qualla.com/red-sea-rift en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:29 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/s/g/e/p/red-sea-rift-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Red Sea Rift https://qualla.com/red-sea-rift Red Sea Rift: Introduction https://qualla.com/red-sea-rift/ Photo credit Razashah1, CC BY 3.0. Africa and Arabia are moving apart at roughly the speed a fingernail grows. One centimeter per year, give or take, measured by the magnetic stripes frozen into the basalt beneath the Red Sea. At this rate, in a few tens of millions of years, the Red Sea will not be a sea. It will be an ocean. The rift that is opening it, the Red Sea Rift, is a working mid-ocean ridge with its lights on, spreading, cracking, injecting hot basaltic dikes along a line that runs from the Dead Sea in the north to the Afar triple junction in the Horn of Africa, where it meets the East African Rift and the Aden Ridge to make one of the most active tectonic locations on Earth.

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]]> Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/g/e/p/red-sea-rift-wp/sgep-red-sea-rift-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Red Sea Rift: A Sea in Two Acts https://qualla.com/red-sea-rift/ Photo credit Razashah1, CC BY 3.0. The rifting happened in two stages with a long intermission. The first serious motion came in the lower or middle Eocene, followed by seafloor spreading in the late Eocene and early Oligocene. Then, for roughly 30 million years, the system went quiet. During that quiet, evaporati...

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]]> Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/g/e/p/red-sea-rift-wp/sgep-red-sea-rift-a-sea-in-two-acts.mp3 0:06 2 full Red Sea Rift: How You Open an Ocean https://qualla.com/red-sea-rift/ Photo credit Razashah1, CC BY 3.0. Geologists describe the mechanism in three steps. First, a thermal anomaly rises in the mantle and thins the continental lithosphere above it, lifting the asthenosphere toward the surface. Second, the crust stretches and thins, and basaltic dikes intrude along the weak spots. Thi...

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]]> Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/g/e/p/red-sea-rift-wp/sgep-red-sea-rift-how-you-open-an-ocean.mp3 0:06 3 full Red Sea Rift: Crust Beneath the Cracking https://qualla.com/red-sea-rift/ Photo credit Razashah1, CC BY 3.0. What lies beneath the central trough is oceanic crust, on that point geologists agree. What lies beneath the flanks and coastal plains is the subject of ongoing argument. One school holds that the entire Red Sea basin is underlain by oceanic crust. Another argues that only part o...

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]]> Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/g/e/p/red-sea-rift-wp/sgep-red-sea-rift-crust-beneath-the-cracking.mp3 0:06 4 full Red Sea Rift: Fire in the Gap https://qualla.com/red-sea-rift/ Photo credit Razashah1, CC BY 3.0. In the southern Red Sea, the basaltic stratovolcano Jabal al-Tair rises as an island at the mouth of the sea, roughly halfway between Yemen and Eritrea, just northwest of the Bab al-Mandab strait. On September 30, 2007, it erupted after 124 years of dormancy, reminding everyone t...

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]]> Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/g/e/p/red-sea-rift-wp/sgep-red-sea-rift-fire-in-the-gap.mp3 0:06 5 full Red Sea Rift: Brines at the Bottom https://qualla.com/red-sea-rift/ Photo credit Razashah1, CC BY 3.0. In 1949, an oceanographic survey of the central Red Sea reported something that sounded impossible: the water at the bottom of the axial trough was hot. Subsequent work through the 1960s confirmed it. Saline brines at roughly 60 degrees Celsius were sitting in pools on the sea fl...

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]]> Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/g/e/p/red-sea-rift-wp/sgep-red-sea-rift-brines-at-the-bottom.mp3 0:06 6 full Red Sea Rift: A Young Ocean, Watching You https://qualla.com/red-sea-rift/ Photo credit Razashah1, CC BY 3.0. Fly north up the Red Sea and you are flying above a rift that is changing the map of the Earth. The coastlines of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, of Sudan and Eritrea, are the edges of continents pulling apart. The reefs along those coasts grow in waters heated from below as well as from...

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]]> Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/g/e/p/red-sea-rift-wp/sgep-red-sea-rift-a-young-ocean-watching-you.mp3 0:06 7 full