What is the Great Rift Valley?

The Great Rift Valley is a continuous geographic trench and a series of depressions extending thousands of kilometers. Originally defined as running from northern Syria to Mozambique, the term encompasses major geological features like the East African Rift System. In modern geology, specific terms like the Afro-Arabian Rift System are often preferred to describe the underlying tectonic structures.

What we know

• The Great Rift Valley was originally defined as a series of contiguous geographic depressions running from northern Syria through the Red Sea to Mozambique. [1, 2]
• British geologist John Walter Gregory introduced the term in 1896, building on the earlier work of Austrian geologist Eduard Suess. [2]
• Geologists now often prefer the term Afro-Arabian Rift System over Great Rift Valley to describe the underlying geological structures. [2]
• The Kenyan portion of the rift was formed on the Kenyan Dome through interactions among the Arabian, Nubian, and Somali tectonic plates. [3]

Still open

• While older definitions treated the entire expanse from Syria to Mozambique as a single continuous feature, modern geologists prefer more specific regional terminology like the Afro-Arabian Rift System.

Where to go next

• how it workedHow is the East African Rift splitting the continent?
• how we knowWhat fossils were discovered in Kenya's Rift Valley?
• a case in pointHow does the Jordan Rift Valley connect to the Red Sea?
• whoWho was John Walter Gregory?
• the bigger pictureHow do tectonic plates create continental rifts?
• an unexpected connectionHow do Syrian plains connect to Mozambique through geology?Early geologists linked features as far apart as northern Syria and Mozambique into a single continuous rift valley system.

Sources

• [1]Great Rift Valley (Wikidata Q81591) · CC0 1.0
• [2]Great Rift Valley · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [3]Great Rift Valley, Kenya · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [4]East African Rift · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [5]Jordan Rift Valley · CC BY-SA 4.0

Your path

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