Ethiopian Sea opening

The intriguing Afar region, on the Ethiopian seacoast across from Yemen, is getting a new portrait made with a seismic array (like the USArray experiment). This from a backgrounder press release from the University of Leicester, which by the way has a prodigious news apparatus. It's part of Project EAGLE (the Ethiopia Afar Geoscientific Lithospheric Experiment). The Afar is stretching apart into a young ocean, the best spot on Earth to study this process. Supposedly there are mantle plumes and "dense igneous rock" plutons under it all. We'll see what the anti-plumists make of the data. There's a lot to learn from this project, both about the upper mantle and about conducting this kind of research.