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Nile River May be 30 Mln Years Old, Researchers


Mon 18 Nov 2019 | 03:31 PM
Yassmine Elsayed

For thousands of years, the Nile River has been associated with the ancient civilization of Egypt, known to have fertilized valleys along its winding path through northeastern Africa, and to date, still considered an important route of transport and irrigation.

The age of this river has been recently a disputed issue among researchers, where some claim that the river, which stretch over 4,225 miles (6,800 kilometers), was born around 6 million years ago when a drainage system changed course, while others claim the river is five times older than that.

A new study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, found that the Nile River may have emerged around 30 million years ago, driven by the motion of Earth’s mantle — the thick layer of rock between the Earth's core and crust.

According to lead author Claudio Faccenna, a professor at the Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas, the Nile River may have formed at the same time as the Ethiopian highlands is one of the River's major branches, called the Blue Nile, begins.

Live Science which reported on the study wrote that the Blue Nile brings in the majority of the Nile River's water — and most of the sediments in it— joining with the river's other tributary (the White Nile) in Sudan, before emptying out into the Mediterranean Sea.

In the study, Faccenna and his team analyzed sediments collected from the Nile Delta — land created as sediment is deposited where the river meets the Mediterranean — and compared their composition and age with ancient volcanic rock found on the Ethiopian plateau. They found that the sediments and rocks matched and were between 20 million and 30 million years old, suggesting the river was formed at the same time as the plateau.

"So then the researchers were interested in seeing how the river was possibly connected to Earth’s mantle, as the theory suggested," Faccenna told Live Science.

In their study, Faccenna and the team created a computer simulation that replayed 40 million years of Earth's plate tectonics — a theory that suggests Earth's outer shell is cut up into pieces that move around and glide over the mantle.

"The simulation showed that a hot mantle plume — an upsurge of extremely hot rock in the mantle — pushed the ground upward, creating the Ethiopian highlands and also activated a still-existing mantle "conveyor belt" that pushes upward on the Ethiopian highlands in the south and pulls the ground down in the north. This creates a northward slope, on which the Nile still runs," Faccenna explained.