Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:Though East Africa used to be more of a savanna than a desert, it has dried out over the millennia. It is predicted that the tectonic plate beneath East Africa will eventually split into two plates separated by an ocean. Then everything dried up and East Africa transitioned to a climate that would continue to become more and more arid. As faults in the East African Rift Zone deepen, East Africa is pulling away from the rest of the land mass. East Africa is slowly detaching itself from the rest of the continent by a quarter of an inch (6.35 mm) every year.