Great Rift Valley

For other uses, see Great Rift Valley (disambiguation).

The Great Rift Valley (GRV) is a series of contiguous geographic depressions, approximately 6,500 kilometres (4,000 mi) in total length, which, in its original definition, runs from "the plains of northern Syria" in the north, through the Red Sea, to Mozambique in the south. The term remains in use in the fields of geography, zoology, ecology, paleontology and other disciplines, but it is now rarely used in geology where the term "Afro-Arabian Rift System" is preferred, which describes the series of geological structures that have given rise to the geographical feature. Great Rift Valley is also often used to refer to valleys, such as the Kenyan Rift Valley, within the East African Rift system.

The term was introduced by British geologist John Walter Gregory in 1896, following on from the work of Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, who first proposed the existence of a linked set of features extending from Syria to Mozambique.


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.