Time and time again, Hollywood has embraced an imminent apocalypse, as films like “2012” beamed the fictionalized end of the world onto the big screen.Fortunately, the scientific logic for many such movies has been, to put it lightly, creative. The planet’s crust did not suddenly shift 14 years ago and sweep most of us away in a flurry of earthquakes, eruptions and megatsunamis.And yet, by the time you reach the end of this sentence, Africa will have moved a little closer to splitting apart. The remote Afar region of Northern Ethiopia sits at the center of a Y-shaped rift system, along which the continent is separating to form a new ocean.AdvertisementAdvertisementLeave your canned food on the shelf and put down the apocalypse shovel, there’s no need to make a beeline for your doomsday bunker. This is less a case of “The Day After Tomorrow” movie and more a matter of the day after a few million years.“It can often get lost in communication,” Emma Watts, part of a research team who embarked on an extensive research project to study the area, told CNN.“People see that and they’re like, ‘Oh no, it’s breaking apart!’ No, it’s very, very slow … I could say it until I’m blue in the face, but people still go for the clickbait title. You just have to kind of grin and bear it.”A hellish paradiseOne of the driest and hottest areas on the planet, where summer temperatures tick over 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit), the aptly-named Afar region is about as remote and hostile as could possibly be. In its Danakil Depression lies the Erta Ale volcano, home to a decades-old lava lake and locally dubbed “the gateway to hell.”AdvertisementAdvertisementFor scientists, though, it’s paradise.unknown content item-More in ScienceThat’s bec …
