REUNION ISLAND, FRANCE — A massive subterranean ‘tree’ moving lava up to the Earth’s surface could, in millions of years, cause the disintegration of Africa, according to a study in the Nature Geoscience journal .
Quanta Magazine explains that most often volcanoes’ existences are explained by tectonic plate boundaries interacting with each other in a variety of different directions.
However, mantle plumes, defined by Science Daily as ‘upwellings of abnormally hot rock within the Earth's mantle,’ can also form volcanoes as tectonic plates pass over them like marshmallows over a campfire, and the new study fills in previously simplistic ideas about plumes, via the aforementioned subterranean ‘tree,' which extends 3,000 kilometers between East Africa and Reunion, a French island in the western Indian Ocean.
This plume may have already spent 120 million years dragging Australia away from India and Antarctica, Madagascar from Africa, and the Seychelles from India, but the new map of its ‘branches’ suggests it could one day contribute to East Africa splitting off from the rest of the continent and, beyond that, produce cataclysmic eruptions from below South Africa that have apocalyptic consequences.