The East African Rift is the southern end of a rift system that extends from the Jordan Valley of the Middle East to the coast of Mozambique. Active for the past 40 million years, the rift will eventually split the Continent, opening a sea between the primary land mass, to the west, and a smaller segment to the east. In east-central Africa, a 750 mile-long western branch of this rift system, known as the Albertine Rift, harbors a chain of lakes: from north to south, these are Lakes Albert, Edward, Kivu and Tanganyika.
The Albertine Rift is bordered by six mountain ranges along its corridor; the most famous are the Virunga Volcanoes, northeast of Lake Kivu, and the Rwenzori Mountains, NNE of Lake Edward. The Virungas, home to critically endangered mountain gorillas, lie on the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC); capped by Mt. Karisimbi, 14,790 feet, the Virungas formed within the rift and are slowly moving to the east. The Rwenzori Mountains, along the border of DRC and Uganda, are a fault-block range that rose during the Pliocene (about 3 million years ago) and were sculpted by mountain glaciers during the Pleistocene; even today, this massive range of Precambrian rock, capped by Mt. Stanley (16,760 feet), has permanent snow fields in the heart of the tropics. The Rwenzoris lie at the west edge of the Albertine Rift and are gradually moving to the northwest.
Volcanoes National Park protects the Virungas within Rwanda while Rwenzori Mountains National Park lies just within Uganda; Virunga National Park, established in 1925 (the first in Africa), lies in the DRC and stretches along the Albertine Rift Valley between the Virungas and the Rwenzoris. Once home to a spectacular diversity of plant and animal life, these Parks are slowly recovering from the devastation of human conflict that occured throughout the late 20th Century.
