The hole in the crust

Daily Galaxy December 27th 2009 … in 2005 an Ethiopian volcano erupted and in the process a 35 mile rift in the landscape was created – in days (instant geology). The writer says, almost off-handedly, that nature appears to make changes much more rapidly than geology allows. However, the uniformitarian model seems to just bob up and down and take these observations on the chin without a flicker. New oceans are thought to form when magma forces it’s way into rifts between tectonic plates so a team of scientists have been out in Ethiopia looking for clues to what happened in earlier geological events. They found the rift matched precisely all the signs of a prototype ocean bed forming but it is the spectacular speed in which it happened that has surprised them. It was assumed such things occurred very slowly in much smaller steps but this sudden upheaval which ripped open the earth in less than a week is puzzling them. Questions on the geophysical processes which shape the earth mean that scientists will be studying the region for a long time to come.