Where Is the Great Rift Valley?

The East African Rift System, commonly called the Great Rift Valley, is a massive geological fracture that extends roughly 6,000 km from the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon, through the Red Sea, and down through eastern Africa to Mozambique. In East Africa, the rift splits into two branches: the Western Rift (along the borders of the DRC, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania) and the Eastern Rift (through Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania). The rift is a divergent tectonic boundary where the African plate is slowly splitting into the Nubian and Somali plates at a rate of about 6-7 mm per year. In 50 million years, this could create a new ocean basin.