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Once and Future Ocean

MIT-WHOI Joint Program graduate student Laura Stevens marks the location of a buried geophone in Botswana along the East African Rift, where two pieces of Earth’s crust are separating, forming what will one day be seafloor. East Africa is one of the few places on land where this process is visible—the vast majority of rifting occurs underwater along the Mid-ocean Ridge. Stevens and fellow graduate student Hannah Mark traveled to southern Africa to participate in PRIDE, a program to study the processes that drive rifting and how rifting changes over millions of years.(Photo by Hannah Mark, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)