The desert floor in Ethiopia looks fixed and ancient, but it is moving. Across the Afar region and down the East African Rift ...

A long, low basin in eastern Africa has spent millions of years collecting some of the most important clues to human origins. Now it is offering another kind of evidence, this time from far below the ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: Though East Africa used to be more of a savanna than a desert, it has dried out over the millennia. With less water in the lakes, especially Lake ...

Dry conditions reduce lake levels—unleashing powerful forces ...

Deep beneath East Africa, the planet is quietly rewriting its own map. A colossal crack is opening in the crust, slowly enough that no one alive today will see the final result, yet fast enough that ...

Beneath East Africa’s Turkana Rift, scientists have found the crust is thinning to a critical point, suggesting the continent is gradually breaking apart. This “necking” process marks an advanced ...

The “Samburu Special Five” — the reticulated giraffe, Grévy’s zebra, beisa oryx, gerenuk and Somali ostrich — exist only in northern Kenya, southern Ethiopia and Somalia, where they have evolved ...

Eastern Africa’s Turkana Rift is both a hotbed for fossil discoveries of our earliest ancestors and a literal hotbed of volcanic activity caused by shifting tectonic plates. Now researchers have found ...

A landmark climate case before the African Court asks what African states must do to protect human rights, phase out fossil ...

Timeline of atmospheric CO₂ evolution, faunal turnover, and topographic uplift during the Miocene, providing a contextual framework for interpreting ecological and climate model results. (A) ...