Page 68 - Volcano and Geothermal Tourism

3

Volcano Tourism in Ethiopia

and the Danakil Rift Zone

Jens Edelmann and Richard Roscoe which also encompasses the Arabian massif. This
unit, which includes the present-day states of
Introduction Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, northern Kenya, the
Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, and Arabia, has a
Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic complex geological history (Mohr, 1960).
Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country Physiogeographically Ethiopia consists of two
situated in the Horn of Africa. It is bordered by main plateaus, the Ethiopian and the Somalian,
Eritrea to the north, Sudan to the west, Kenya to separated by the huge Ethiopian Rift Valley. The
the south, Somalia to the east and Djibouti to the most famous rivers on the Ethiopian plateau are
north-east. With an area of 1,100,000km² and an the Blue and White Nile, which are fed by
estimated population of over 85,000,000, it is numerous tributaries. The plateau rises to great
Africa’s second-most populous nation. The country heights in places, including the Simien Mounts
capital Addis Ababa, is one of the oldest in the massif in eastern Beghemeder, a Hawaiian-type
world, and the ancient city of Axum and the volcanic pile now bounded by gigantic erosional
stunning monolithic rock churches of Lalibela are precipices on almost all sides. This massif includes
just two striking remnants of its past. It is also one many summits reaching over 4000 metres above
of the earliest sites of human settlement. ‘Lucy’, sea level, including the highest peak of Ethiopia,
discovered in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia’s Afar Ras Dashen, which is 4620m high (Mohr, 1960).
region, is the world’s oldest, most complete, and Though the focus within this chapter is on
best preserved adult Australopithecine fossil at an tourism at the active volcanoes of Ethiopia, the
estimated 3.2 million years old. At the beginning thick flood basalts (traps) in the central Ethiopian
of the 1980s, a series of famines hit Ethiopia. These Highlands are certainly also worth a visit. These
affected about 8 million people and left about 1 consist of intermediate and silicic lavas with
million dead, and the country is periodically interstratified pyroclastic sediments, which are
affected by insurrections particularly in the hard- superimposed on a highly folded basement of Pre-
hit northern regions of Tigray and Eritrea. In May Cambrian rocks and mesozoic marine strata.
1998, a border dispute with Eritrea, independent
from Ethiopia since 1993, led to the Eritrean– The Ethiopian Rift Valley
Ethiopian war that lasted until June 2000.
Separating the Ethiopian and Somalian plateaus,
Geological and structural the Ethiopian Rift Valley (an extension of the East
African Rift Valley), is a relatively sunken, faulted
outlines of Ethiopia zone, which runs generally SSW–NNE from Lake
Ethiopia forms part of the large structural unit Turkana (formerly Lake Rudolf) to the Danakil
known to geoscientists as the Horn of Africa, triangle where the African Rift System joins the

Ch03.indd 45 3/28/2010 1:26:48 PM