how is a rift valley formed and what is an aquifer?

Answer 1

Most of the void spaces in the rocks below the water table are filled with water. This volume of rocks in one geographic area is an aquifer.
The Great Rift Valley is a vast geographical and geological feature that runs north to south for some 5,000 km, from northern Syria in Southwest Asia to central Mozambique in East Africa.

Answer 2

Aquifer:
in hydrology, rock layer that contains water and releases it in appreciable amounts. The rock contains water-filled pore spaces, and, when the spaces are connected, the water is able to flow through the matrix of the rock. An aquifer also may be called a water-bearing stratum, lens, or zone.

A confined aquifer is a water-bearing stratum that is confined or overlain by a rock layer that does not transmit water in any appreciable amount or that is impermeable. There probably are few truly confined aquifers, because tests have shown that the confining strata, or layers, although they do not readily transmit water, over a period of time contribute large quantities of water by slow leakage to supplement production from the principal aquifer.

A groundwater aquifer is said to be unconfined when its upper surface (water table) is open to the atmosphere through permeable material. As opposed to a confined aquifer, the water table in an unconfined aquifer system has no overlying impervious rock layer to separate it from the atmosphere.

Rift Valley:
any elongated trough formed by the subsidence of a segment of the Earth's crust between dip-slip, or normal, faults. Such a fault is a fracture in the terrestrial surface in which the rock material on the upper side of the fault plane has been displaced downward relative to the rock below the fault. A rift valley constitutes a type of tectonic valley and, as such, differs from river and glacial valleys, which are produced by erosional forces.

Rift valleys are usually narrow and long, some measuring hundreds of kilometres in length. Their floors are relatively flat, owing in large part to volcanic deposition and marine or lacustrine sedimentation. The sides of rift valleys drop steeply away in the form of steps and terraces. At their margins, the walls of the valleys may rise hundreds of metres.

Rift valleys are found both on the continents and on the floor of ocean basins. In terms of the theory of plate tectonics (q.v.), they occur in divergence zones, belts where two of the various lithospheric plates that make up the Earth's surface are separating. Numerous submarine rift valleys have been discovered along the crests of the large ridges that run throughout the Earth's oceans. These ridges are centres of seafloor spreading: areas where magma from the mantle is welling up, cooling to form new oceanic crust, and is moving away from the crests in either direction.

The distribution of rift valleys on the continents is irregular and relatively sparse, but they seem to occur at sites of incipient plate spreading. Many have volcanic cones on their floors or contain deep lakes. The most extensive of the continental rift valleys are those of the East African Rift System, which extend northward to the Red Sea and eastward into the Indian Ocean. Other notable examples include the Baikal Rift Valley (Russia) and the Rhine Rift Valley (Germany).

Answer 3

A rift valley is formed when two tectonic plates pull apart.
An aquifer is an underground body of water; usually the water is held in place by porous rock such as limestone.

Answer 4

For the formation of the rift valley, it's about two tectonic plates that slide past each other such that you get a subducted zone (the rift is created), a good example would be the East African Rift Valley.

Answer 5

a rift valley is formed when there are crustal plate movements on the earth's surface. at a fault line, one plate slides away from the other plate and a rift valley is formed when many plates do the same thing. the biggest rift valley is in east africa.

Answer 6

i don't know about formation of rift valley.But, aquifer is the part of water that is in between hard rocks...........

Answer 7

a layer of rock which holds and stores water and also allows water to pass through it,is porous and permeable is known as an aquifier