Four Ethiopian air force pilots have joined Ginbot7…Breaking News!ESAT

    


Four Ethiopian air force pilots have joined Ginbot7…Breaking News!ESAT

Ethiopia’s giant underground blob of magma puzzles scientists

    
Becky OskinLiveScience

Graham Dawes

The Afar Rift in Ethiopia makes a bold impression when seen from a helicopter.

The Afar Rift in Ethiopia is marked by enormous gashes that signal the breakup of the African continent and the beginnings of a new ocean basin, scientists think.
The fractures appear eerily similar to seafloor spreading centers, the volcanic ridges that mark the boundaries between two pieces of oceanic crust. Along the ridges, lava bubbles up and new crust is created, slowly widening the ocean basin.
But a look deep beneath the Afar Rift reveals that the birth announcements may be premature. “It’s not as close to fully formed seafloor spreading as we thought,” said Kathy Whaler, a geophysicist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
Whaler and her colleagues have spotted 120 cubic miles (500 cubic kilometers) of magma sitting in the mantle under the Afar Rift. Hot liquids such as magma like to rise, so the discovery is a conundrum.
“We didn’t expect this, because magma wants to pop up like a cork in water; it’s too buoyant compared to the surrounding medium in the mantle,” Whaler told LiveScience’s OurAmazingPlanet.
Models predict that at spreading ridges, magma should sit just under the rifts, in the crust. That’s what geoscientists see in the oceans, at places such as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the Juan de Fuca Ridge. But not only is the giant pool at Afar extremely deep, but it is also mostly below the sleeping Badi volcano, many miles west of the scene of a 2005 series of underground magma intrusions, Whaler said.
“You just wouldn’t expect to have a blob of magma still underneath this other area,” Whaler said. “It’s one of the things we’re still having a lot of discussions about.”
The findings, published Sept. 5 in the journal Nature Geoscience, add a new twist to the Afar Rift puzzle. Thanks to intense international attention — from scientists intrigued by the 2005 intrusions — the region is one of the best-studied spreading centers in the world. But a lively debate continues over whether the Afar Rift is a unique case or a textbook example of a fracturing continent.
Triple threat The Afar region sits at the junction of three tectonic plates, all of which are spreading apart. Here, Earth’s brittle crust fractures as the plates tear away from one another, but the mantle underneath adjusts by stretching like warm plastic. The mantle rocks rising beneath the thinning crust melt from lowered pressure, creating magma. [Infographic: Tallest Mountain to Deepest Ocean Trench]
In 2005, a series of earthquakes in Dabbahu, Ethiopia, announced the arrival of new magma squeezing into the crust. Vertical fingers of molten rock shot into underground fractures, 14 in all. The longest intrusion was about 26 feet (8 meters) wide and spread through 37 miles (60 kilometers) of crust in just 10 days.

Graham Dawes

Fractures along the Afar Rift in Ethiopia resemble those at a mid-ocean ridge, where two pieces of oceanic crust spread apart.

Whaler and her colleagues searched for the source of these vertical injections, called dikes, with instruments that measure changes in magnetic and electric fields in the Earth. Both are sensitive to underground liquids, which have a higher electrical conductivity than rock (meaning electrons have an easier time moving through them).
The team discovered the feeder for the magma intrusions: a shallow, small chamber directly under the dikes, about 4 miles (7 kilometers) wide and 3 to 6 miles (5 to 10 kilometers) below the surface.
Rare reservoir But in the mantle, the layer beneath Earth’s crust, a huge 18-mile-wide (30-kilometer-wide) region of very high conductivity reaches down to a depth of 20 miles (35 kilometers), well below the 12-mile-thick (20-kilometer-thick) crust. This giant magma zone isn’t one big pool, but a series of interconnected pockets, scientists think.
The findings were bolstered by research in geochemistry, rock composition and seismology from other teams, Whaler said. “The results from standard electrical conductivity get a huge range, so the additional information gives additional bounds. I suspect nobody would have believed us without some supporting evidence from other techniques.”
For example, a study published in the journal Nature on July 4 shows the mantle under the Afar region is about 180 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Celsius) hotter than it should be. And although the crust is thinner than in other spots around the planet, it is actually thicker than models predict. [What is Earth Made Of?]
Questions remain Taken together, the recent discoveries suggest researchers still don’t understand how the final stages of breakup occur in continental crust, Whaler said.
“Most people have said we can look at the Afar Rift and it’s a good on-land analogue of midocean ridges,” she said. “But what this result says is, there is still quite a distinct difference between the crust and upper mantle beneath a fully formed spreading ridge and the Afar Rift.”
For Roger Buck, a geophysicist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who was not involved in the study, the discovery raises questions about what controls the timing of magmatic activity such as dike intrusions.

Ethiopian children: The adoption ordeal

Hana Williams

         By Tewodros Abebe
Greetings to all.
As we celebrate the Ethiopian New Year, let us think of solutions that we, individually and collectively, can propose to stop the horrific crimes that are being committed against children under the cover of adoption. This past week, a court in the state of Washington found a husband and wife guilty of the death of a young Ethiopian girl they adopted. Little Hana died in 2011, aged thirteen, after suffering unimaginable physical and emotional abuse.Following the guilty verdict, a Reuters news story, published on September 9, 2013, reported that Hana, at the time of her death "was found unconscious outside shortly after midnight in temperatures hovering around 40 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius)". The article, quoting investigators, also stated that Hana endured "beatings, starvation, being forced to sleep outside and use an outdoor toilet and that she had lost a significant amount of weight since her adoption."
Hana's adoptive parents, Carri and Larry Williams, were willing to give her their last name; tragically, they denied her the basic love and protection that a child is entitled to get from a parent or a guardian. For the sake of all vulnerable children, all of us need to demand a more accountable adoption process and for the implementation of an effective post-adoption mechanism.The article I referred above mentions a Texas case in which a little boy who was adopted from Russia died under suspicious circumstances; his adoptive parents were not charged. But, the article states, "Russian officials seized on the case as justification of a 2012 ban on adoptions by Americans." Given the many horrible incidents involving adopted Ethiopian children around the world and, also, Ethiopian women in the Middle East, where do we stand, as a nation, when it comes to defending the safety and dignity of Ethiopians?
I sincerely hope that the price of life that Hana paid will bring a better future for adopted children everywhere.

In Ethiopia, State Controls Hold Back Waking Giant

Displaying young glamorous women like this one, the government is doing what normally should have been done by private businesses, largely billed as the engine of economic growth. When is the monopoly to end?

 Reuters    
ADDIS ABABA — When global drinks giant Diageo bought a brewery in Ethiopia, it paid a premium for a stake in a barely tapped African market that in the 1980s had spectacularly failed to feed its own population.

Diageo paid $225 million for state-owned Meta Abo, joining a list of firms seeking a foothold in Africa's second most populous nation that was once run by communists and now has an emerging middle class after a decade of double-digit growth.“We paid a premium of course and that was a deliberate decision ... We knew the value of what we were buying,” Francis Agbonlahor, Diageo's managing director at Meta Abo, told Reuters in a capital that boasts smart highways and new office blocks.

Ethiopia is now sub-Saharan Africa's fifth biggest economy, leap-frogging next door Kenya and wooing investors from Sweden, Britain and China, as other emerging markets lose some of their shine.

Few nations can better tell the story of “Africa Rising,” the narrative of a hopelessly mismanaged and violent continent now prized for strong growth and, in many cases, the kind of political stability scarcely imaginable a decade or two ago.
  Yet like other African nations, Ethiopia must now work out how to maintain economic momentum as the U.S. Federal Reserve starts to turn off the taps of easy money that drove investors to more adventurous markets, and when China's economy and those of other emerging powers start to shift down a gear.

That means another tricky transition for Ethiopia, which has until now relied on the state to run its economy, but which has seen growth rates slip to 7-8 percent, short of the level needed for its goal of middle income status by 2025.

“When you are starting from a very low base with a lot of donor support, it is easy enough to grow in a strong, robust way,” said Razia Khan, head of Africa research for Standard Chartered bank. “As the economy matures ... it is going to become a lot more difficult.”

Dilemma

Opening up the economy, as many businesses at home and abroad want, could draw in new investment but may also loosen the controls that can be exerted by a government made up of ethnic and regional parties that has carefully managed development and kept a lid on rivalries.

That is the dilemma for Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn and his cabinet, who still work in the shadow of Meles Zenawi, the rebel-turned-statesman who ruled with an iron grip for two decades until he died last year. Caution remains the watchword.

“We are not ready now,” Foreign Affairs Minister Tedros Adhanom told Reuters when asked if Ethiopia could open up its mobile network or banks, prime targets for foreign investors.

Concerns about a deepening rich-poor divide and worries about changing the tried and tested policies of a charismatic leader, all weigh in to deter officials from a big shift.

But moving too slowly risks squandering investor enthusiasm and damaging the prospects of a nation once best known for “Red Terror” purges under communist rule in the 1970s and its 1980s famine. For now, at least, it has not deterred investors.

“I was in India recently and the thing that caught me by surprise [when talking] to foreign investors [was] the country that kept being mentioned was Ethiopia,” said Khan.

Diageo is not alone in seeing the potential. Heineken of Holland and France's BGI Castel have snapped up breweries, which were among first state firms to be sold off.

The Ethiopian Investment Agency says Unilever and Nestle are sniffing around, and South Korea's Samsung told Reuters it was exploring Ethiopia as a place to assemble its electronic goods. The two European companies did not comment.