Marnie Chesterton

It is near the border with Uganda and South Sudan and also Ethiopia.

However, as you may know, generally East Africa itself sits on a huge tectonic boundary.

So the ground beneath Eastern Africa is gradually stretching.

It's thinning and it's cracking as two tectonic plates now drift away from each other.

OK, so tectonic plates, these are enormous plates of earth, I guess, on which we all sit and there are the cracks between the plates and the plates are either pushing towards each other or grinding against their neighbour in an unsexy way, which makes earthquakes.

And the big tectonic boundary in Africa is where these two plates are moving apart, right?

Yeah.

Yes, you've described it perfectly.

So essentially the African continent is dividing along two massive tectonic plates.

Now it's the Nubian plate to the west and the Somali plate to the east.

The East African rift now is the fracture system forming between them.

Okay, so that's the geology lesson.

Tell me more about the new research and specifically this conversation about why you can't have a beach in the middle of Kenya.

Yes.

So now let's go back to Turkana and why the Turkana region is so important.

This is because scientifically, it's one of the very few places on Earth, Mani, where researchers can actually observe a continent in the process of breaking apart.

Scientists studying areas like the Turkana rift in Kenya and Ethiopia, they're finding that the crust there may be thinning faster, you know, than expected.

And this process, they have a name for it and they call it necking.

So when you say, Phyllis, faster than expected, how fast are we talking?

Now, don't be scared.