Excerpt from Quartz Africa

In prehistoric times around 88 million years ago, Madagascar, the island country in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa, split off from the Indian subcontinent. Now, a new study shows the island is breaking up again, this time into smaller islands.

The gradual splitting of the African continent along the eastern region has been a major geological subject centered on the East African Rift system. Several reports on the rift system have described how the continent is breaking apart to form a new ocean at the volcanic “Y” junction of the Afar region in Ethiopia. The “large crack” which appeared in Kenya a country where the rift is well displayed led to more questions about the African continent splitting into two.

While the East African rift system is thought to stretch from the Afar region of Ethiopia down south to Mozambique in a new study, scientists are saying the splitting is “more complex and more distributed than previously thought”. It has been found that the rift system extends further down to the island of Madagascar which is also currently slowly breaking apart.