Consider the following statements regarding the physical geography of the African continent: 1. The East African Rift System represents an active continental rift valley where the African plate is splitting into the Nubian and Somalian tectonic plates. 2. Lake Victoria, the largest tropical lake in the world, occupies a deep tectonic graben similar to Lake Tanganyika within the East African Rift valley.

💡 Solution & Explanation

Statement 1 is correct because the East African Rift is an active divergent boundary splitting the African craton into distinct tectonic plates. Statement 2 is incorrect because while Lake Tanganyika occupies a deep fault-bounded graben within the western rift branch, Lake Victoria fills a broad, shallow sag depression located between the eastern and western rift branches, rather than a rift graben. Rift valley geomorphology provides exceptional windows into early-stage continental breakup processes.