Abstract
For much of Ethiopia’s history the Western highlands were, essentially, Ethiopia.
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- 1.
“Ethiopia” is the Greek translation of the Hebrew name “Cush”, which is used in the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament. Modern translations of the Old Testament tend to use “Cush” and “Ethiopia” interchangeably. There is, however, some dispute as to whether “Cush” and “Ethiopia” refer to the same country. In any case, neither corresponds geographically to today’s Ethiopia.
- 2.
It would be interesting to know how frequently eruptions took place during this period. To determine this, though straightforward in principle, is not so easy in practice. It is difficult to follow an individual flow physically in order to determine its size since obstacles such as vegetation, soil cover, overlying flows and deep gorges get in the way, and it has to be tracked by making detailed measurements of its chemical composition. This has not yet been done in Ethiopia, and in very few places elsewhere. Based on the very sparse measurements available, an average volume of 10 cu km for an individual flow seems not unreasonable as an extremely ballpark figure. If half the estimated total of 250,000 cu km of Trap Series lavas were erupted during the 2 million years of maximum activity, a flow of this volume would be required every 150 years or so, somewhere in the country.
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Williams, F.M. (2016). The Western Highlands: Lava Flows and Great Volcanoes. In: Understanding Ethiopia. GeoGuide. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02180-5_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02180-5_12
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