page_title: Red Sea
section_title: Geology
hierarchical_section_title: Red Sea / Geology
context_page_description: The Red Sea is a seawater inlet of the Indian Ocean, lying between Africa and Arabia. Its connection to the ocean is in the south, through the Bab el Mandeb strait and the Gulf of Aden. To its north lie the Sinai Peninsula, the Gulf of Aqaba, and the Gulf of Suez. It is underlain by the Red Sea Rift, which is part of the Great Rift Valley.
  The Red Sea has a surface area of roughly 438,000 km², is about 2250 km long, and — at its widest point — 355 km wide. It has an average depth of 490 m, and in the central Suakin Trough it reaches its maximum depth of 3,040 m.
  The Red Sea also has extensive shallow shelves, noted for their marine life and corals. The sea is the habitat of over 1,000 invertebrate species and 200 types of soft and hard coral. It is the world's northernmost tropical sea, and has been designated a Global 200 ecoregion.
context_section_description: The Red Sea was formed by the Arabian peninsula being split from the Horn of Africa by movement of the Red Sea Rift. This split started in the Eocene and accelerated during the Oligocene. The sea is still widening (in 2005, following a three-week period of tectonic activity it had grown by 8m), and it is considered that it will become an ocean in time (as proposed in the model of John Tuzo Wilson). In 1949, a deep water survey reported anomalously hot brines in the central portion of the Red Sea. Later work in the 1960s confirmed the presence of hot, 60 °C (140 °F), saline brines and associated metalliferous muds. The hot solutions were emanating from an active subseafloor rift. Lake Asal in Djibouti is eligible as an experimental site to study the evolution of the deep hot brines of the Red Sea. Indeed, by observing the strontium isotope composition of the Red Sea brines, it is easy to deduce how these salt waters found at the bottom of the Red Sea could have evolved in a similar way to Lake Asal, which ideally represents their compositional extreme. The high salinity of the waters was not hospitable to living organisms.
  Sometime during the Tertiary period, the Bab el Mandeb closed and the Red Sea evaporated to an empty hot dry salt-floored sink. Effects causing this would have been:
  A "race" between the Red Sea widening and Perim Island erupting filling the Bab el Mandeb with lava.
  The lowering of world sea level during the Ice Ages because of much water being locked up in the ice caps.
  A number of volcanic islands rise from the center of the sea. Most are dormant. However, in 2007, Jabal al-Tair island in the Bab el Mandeb strait erupted violently. Two new islands were formed in 2011 and 2013 in the Zubair Archipelago, a small chain of islands owned by Yemen. The first island, Sholan Island, emerged in an eruption in December 2011, the second island, Jadid, emerged in September 2013.
caption: Dust storm over the Red Sea
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