高考英语专题阅读：The Red Sea It’s said that Moses was a leader of the Jewish people in ancient times. According to the story in the Bible, he brought the Israelites （以色列人） out of Egypt. They were able to escape from the Egyptians when God helped Moses make the waters of the Red Sea move so that they could walk across. （详见《圣经 出埃及记》） The Red Sea is parting again. But this time Moses doesn’t have a hand in it. （这次和摩西没什么关系）Satellite images show that the Arabian plate （板块） and the African plate are moving away from each other, stretching the earth’s crust ( 外壳) and widening the southern end of the Red Sea. Last September, a series of earthquakes started splitting (分裂) the planet’s surface along a 37-mile section of the East African Rift (裂缝) in Afar, Ethiopia. Over a period of three weeks, the crust on the sides of the rift moved apart by 26 feet. “We think that the crust and mantle ( 地幔) melt slowly at depths greater than 10 kilometers, where it is hotter, forming molten rock,” said Tim J. Wright. “This molten rock rises through the crust because it is less dense than the surrounding rock.” The molten rock collects in its chambers ( 岩腔) at depths of 3 to 5 kilometers where the density is the same as the crustal rocks, Wright explained. “Slowly, the pressure has been building up in these chambers until last September when it finally cracked, breaking the crust. The molten rock then moved into this crack.” The entry of molten rock into the gap, rather than the cracking of the crust, is responsible for segmentation ( 分割) of continental drifts. For the past 30 million years, Africa and Arabia have been going through a rifting process, the same one that formed the Red Sea. “The ground is continually moving — much more rapidly now than before,” Wright said. “On average, the two sides move apart at about 2 centimeters per year.” This latest split, added to the long-term rifting process, which is tearing the northeast of Ethiopia and Eritrea from the rest of Africa, could eventually create a huge new sea. Although such processes could take millions of years to occur, this event has given scientists an opportunity to monitor the break in real time.
