Just Add Water

First the good news: Geologists have found a permanent cure for droughts in arid East Africa.

The bad news: Relief is about a million years away.

That's how long scientists estimate it will take a giant crack in the surface the Ethiopian desert to deepen enough to eventually join with the Red Sea, which will flood the region and create a new ocean. The 35-mile fissure is 20 feet across at some points, the result of shifting tectonic plates deep below the surface of the Earth.

Hot magma from a volcanic eruption in 2005 widened the crack at the surface, giving scientists a glimpse at the workings of the forces that shape the planet's landscape. Compared to the timelines of most natural events, this one was fairly sudden; researchers at the University of Rochesterand say the chasm opened in the desert floor over the span of just a few days.

The rift is occurring where the African and Arabian plates meet; they've been slowly pulling apart at about an inch per year for the past 30 million years. That means the 20-foot wide surface crack packed 240 years worth of slow separation into a few short days.

The findings, released this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, casts some doubt on the leading theory of how oceans are formed. Ocean-forming rifts like this were believed to happen very gradually, with small bits breaking off over the course of centuries. The Ethiopian ridge shows that volcanoes can help the plates break open much more quickly and in larger chunks than previously thought.

If that's the case, you can add a sudden tsunami to Ethiopia's list of worries. But there's a bright side to everything: Oceanfront property, anyone?