The Main Ethiopian Rift is the northern continental segment of the East African Rift System, a broad valley of active normal faults slicing across the Ethiopian highlands from the Afar depression southwest toward the Kenyan border. It marks a place where the African continent is literally being pulled apart as the crust stretches and thins.
The rift is bounded by long border faults that drop the valley floor thousands of metres below the flanking plateaus, and its centre is peppered with volcanoes, caldera lakes and geothermal fields fed by rising mantle heat. Deformation is gradually migrating from these old border faults toward dense chains of faults along the rift axis.
Earthquakes here are typically shallow and moderate rather than gigantic, but they cluster around the volcanic centres and axial faults where magma and faulting interact. Over geological time this rifting is expected to widen into a new ocean basin, making the Ethiopian Rift a living example of continental break-up.