Meeting at Afar

The Afar region of Ethiopia is not an inviting place - a barren, salty, cracked rockscape with barely any life.

But it's a meeting place of sorts - three separate pieces of Earth's crust bump into one another here, forming what geologists know as the Afar Triple Junction. The central meeting place for the three pieces is around Lake Abbe, just south of the area shown in this image taken by NASA's Terra Satellite.

The three pieces of crust are all pulling away from that central point. But not all three are pulling at the same rate, placing loads of stress on the rock, creating cracks, faults, volcanoes, gas vents, escarpments, and hot springs in the region.

A horizontally running large river-like feature dominates this image. This is a geologic feature called a "graben," a place where a gulley is created where ground sinks as a result of crust pulling apart. The red stuff is some vegetation that somehow survives in this tough terrain.

The Afar region is also home to one of the most famous fossil finds of all time. On Nov. 24, 1974, a team of paleanthropologists discovered the remains the of 3.2-million-year-old hominid Australopithecus afarensis, more commonly known as Lucy.