continental rift

Scientific  

1. A long, narrow fissure in the Earth marking a zone of the lithosphere that has become thinner due to extensional forces associated with plate tectonics. Continental rifts are thousands of kilometers in length and hundreds of kilometers in width, and they are associated with normal faults and with grabens.

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Example Sentences

Here too a continental rift was already obvious, with countries like Germany, Sweden, France and Italy dealing with a disproportionate number of asylum requests while many eastern and Baltic member states hardly take any.

From Washington Times

Finding a layer of ash in the ice wouldn’t be surprising: the West Antarctic Ice Sheet straddles a broad continental rift that is known to harbor volcanoes, some of them exposed on the surface and others sealed under ice.

From Scientific American

The rock was chemically more akin to an unusual type of rock found on oceanic islands like Hawaii and St. Helena, as well as in continental rift zones like the Rio Grande, which extends from Colorado to Chihuahua, Mexico.

From Reuters

The stretching of the Earth’s surface is easier to see at the edges of tectonic plates, where there are typically volcanoes or mountains, but movement on an continental rift is more mysterious.

From Time

They didn’t know that for me they were deep underwater at the same time, slowly floating down past an enormous coral formation, a deep-sea plinth, the rough wall of a continental rift, all of us sinking together through gently bubbling water.

From Time