Afar by NASA
NASA's Earth Observatory has made an overhead shot of the Afar Depression its image of the day (via MetaFilter):
In eastern Africa, in the Afar region of Ethiopia, a nearly barren rockscape marks the location of the meeting place of three separate pieces of the Earth's crust. This meeting place is known to geologists as the Afar Triple Junction; the central meeting place for the three pieces of Earth's crust is around Lake Abbe, just to the south of the area shown in this image from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA's Terra satellite. The three pieces of Earth's crust are each pulling away from that central point, though not all at the same speed.
Understatement-posing-as-segue of the day: "Besides its unusual geology, the Afar region is famous for its fossils."
John Hawks Department of Anthropology
University of Wisconsin—Madison
Copyright © 2007 John Hawks