Running roughly 6,400 kilometers from the Red Sea region down through East Africa to Mozambique, what is the world's longest continental rift system called?
- The Basin and Range Province
- The Great Rift Valley (East African Rift System)
- The Rhine Graben
- The Baikal Rift Zone
Why B? And why not the others?
Correct answer: B. The Great Rift Valley (East African Rift System)
The Great Rift Valley, formally the East African Rift System, stretches roughly 6,400 kilometers from Jordan and the Red Sea down through East Africa to Mozambique, making it the longest rift on land anywhere in the world — and, fittingly, the very ground where some of the oldest known human ancestor fossils have been found, since the valley's shifting terrain repeatedly exposed and preserved them. The Basin and Range Province in the western United States is a genuine large-scale zone of continental stretching, made up of many parallel fault-block mountains and valleys, but it is a broad province of extension rather than one continuous rift of comparable length. The Rhine Graben is a textbook rift valley running through Germany and France, real and well-studied, but only a few hundred kilometers long. The Baikal Rift Zone in Siberia is famous for holding the world's deepest lake, yet the rift itself is far shorter than its East African counterpart.
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: 'East African Rift System' (britannica.com/place/East-African-Rift-System)