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Everyone knows there are five oceans: the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Cold One, the Other
One, and the One People Forget About… but five oceans isn’t cool.
You know what’s cool?
Fanny packs—wait that’s not right.
Six oceans... six oceans is cool--and what if I told you that for the low low price of
$12.99 per month, I could get you a sixth ocean.
I mean you’ll have to wait like 10 million years and the $12.99 isn’t really necessary
for the ocean, but I’m short on cash and I need to buy a new fanny pack.
To understand how this sixth ocean might form, we need to do what privileged white kids trying
to get into Harvard do: go to Africa.
Specifically, to a far away place called the Afar Region, a part of Ethiopia that’s home
to a meeting of three tectonic plates.
Tectonic plates, if you don’t know, are the big pieces of the earth’s crust that
slowly move and sometimes make earthquakes and stuff.
To illustrate, if you imagine the earth is a grape, tectonic plates are like if that
grape had big pieces of the earth’s crust on it that slowly move and sometimes make
earthquakes and stuff.
Here, in the Afar Region, we can see the meeting of the Arabian Plate to the North, the Nubian
Plate to the West, and the Somali Plate to the East, which create a Y-shaped intersection
almost as volatile as the ones Google draws with dotted lines.
The problem is that the plates are moving—the Somali plate is slowly headed southeast, towards
the Indian and Australian plates, and the Arabian plate is slowly headed north, towards
the Eurasian plate, where it will eventually close the Persian gulf, meaning Saudi Arabia
and Iran will eventually have a land border, which I’m sure will go great and be celebrated
with an extra-special fireworks show.
This tectonic movement has formed what’s called “the Great Rift Valley” because
of, you know, all the rifts and stuff: there’s the Red Sea Rift to the west, the Aden Ridge
to the east, the East African Rift to the south, and the Oculus Rift, in stores now
for only $299 plus shipping and handling.
The East African Rift, though, is the key to the potential new ocean.
It’s what’s called a continental rift, a term that currently holds the record for
most esoteric geological phenomenon to ever be the basis of a children’s movie.
Basically, a continental rift is where two tectonic plates that make up a single continent
begin to separate—in this case, the Nubian and Somali plates, which together make up
Africa.
If they keep separating, the continental rift may turn into what’s called an oceanic spreading
ridge: essentially, once the plates move far enough apart, they’ll form a big crack,
which will allow magma to flow up from beneath them, where it will cool and create a new
ocean floor, continuing until Africa has split into Africa: Original Flavor and Africa 2:
Electric Boogaloo, and a new ocean will flow between the newly separated mini-continents.
But you shouldn’t get out your swim trunks, sunscreen, and Aquaman traps just yet: it’ll
be millions of years before this sixth ocean—which I’m proposing we call either Ocean’s 6,
6 Fast 6 Furious, or Ocean and the Chipmunks: The Sixquel—forms.
In the meantime, though, the plates’ slow separation has led to East Africa being home
to a set of geological phenomena that are, much like the Facebook algorithm, equal parts
fascinating and terrifying.
There’s Erta Ale, a massive volcano in Ethiopia which is home to the world’s longest-lasting
lava lake and is almost certainly a Fire Nation base; there’s Lake Tanganyika, the world’s
second-deepest lake, and home to the Goliath Tiger Fish, which looks like if a largemouth
bass had a baby with the clown from It; and there’s also a bunch of giant, tens-of-miles-long
cracks in the ground in Ethiopia and Kenya that look like CGI portals to the underworld.
The point is, and there’s no easy way to say this, but the plates are separating.
It’s not that they don’t love each other, and it’s not that they don’t love you,
but they just need some space.
The main reason for this is something called the Afar plume.
Unlike Jafar’s gloom, which is the main source of conflict in the direct-to-video
Aladdin sequel, the Afar plume is a part of the Earth’s mantle that has been heated
by underground magma.
If you’ve ever stolen a hot air balloon or tooted in the pool—except, don’t fact
check me on that second one—you’ll know that heat tends to make things rise, which
is exactly what happened to the crust above the magma, which eventually rose so much that
it split, thus creating the rift valleys.
It’s worth mentioning that there’s still some debate over whether or not the new ocean
really will form.
Some scientists say that the Arabian and Somali plates may not move enough to create an oceanic
spreading ridge, while other scientists say that if I keep refusing to eat anything other
than Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, I will die.
That’s not related, but it does keep me up at night.
Anyways, whether the new ocean forms or not, we’re all going to be dead in 100 years
regardless, either from climate change, flamin’ hot Cheetos, or both, so I say we should just
be grateful for the oceans we’ve got, except for the Southern Ocean, which I’m almost
positive is fake ocean invented by the Ocean Lobby to sell more waves.
While there might be a new ocean forming, it’s super important that right now, we
preserve the ones we’ve already got.
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