Exploring volcanic hazards and risk in Ethiopia
Introduction
The East African Rift Valley is one of Earth’s most iconic geological features. You can see it
from space, stretching 6,000 km through Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Zambia,
Tanzania, Malawi and Mozambique. The Rift is a gigantic fracture in the Earth’s crust; the
point at which East Africa is splitting in two and new land is being created. The spread is
slower than the rate our fingernails grow, but come back in a few million years and a new
ocean may have formed.
A chain of lakes and volcanoes is found in this channel of subsiding land. Tanganyika (the
second-deepest freshwater lake on Earth) Malawi and Kivu are just some of the lakes
formed by rifting. The thinning crust allows magma to rise, some of it piercing through the
surface to form volcanoes. There are more than 100 young volcanoes (those which have
erupted over the last 10,000 years) along the length of the East African Rift.
In this detailed and lavishly illustrated study, Dr Erin Martin -Jones (University of Cambridge) considers volcanic hazards and risk in Ethiopia based upon her PhD research on lake-bed sediments.
Click the icon below to download the full article as a pdf.
Harry West (UWE) has created an accompanying GIS package to enable students to explore the region and assess for themselves the volcanic hazards associated with a future eruption in the Corbetti caldera, Ethiopia.
Click the icon below to link direct to the GIS experience
About the Authors
Dr Erin Martin-Jones
Science Communicator (University of Cambridge, Department of Earth Sciences)
Erin worked on reconstructing the volcanic history of East Africa for her NERC- -funded PhD at the Department of Geography & Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University, and later as a researcher at the University of Cambridge Tephra Lab, within the Department of Geography.
Harry West (UWE)
Harry West is a GIS specialist at UWE, Bristol.
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