Great Rift Valley in the context of "Southern Levant"

The Red Sea is a sea inlet of the Indian Ocean, lying between Africa and Asia. Its connection to the ocean is in the south, through the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait and the Gulf of Aden. To its north lies the Sinai Peninsula, the Gulf of Aqaba, and the Gulf of Suez, which leads into to the Suez Canal. It is underlain by the Red Sea Rift, which is part of the Great Rift Valley.

The Red Sea has a surface area of roughly 438,000 km (169,000 sq mi), is about 2,250 km (1,400 mi) long, and 355 km (221 mi) wide at its widest point. It has an average depth of 490 m (1,610 ft), and in the central Suakin Trough, it reaches its maximum depth of 3,040 m (9,970 ft).

Burundi, officially the Republic of Burundi, is a landlocked country in East Africa. It is located in the Great Rift Valley at the junction between the African Great Lakes region and Southeast Africa, with a population of over 14 million people. It is bordered by Rwanda to the north, Tanzania to the east and southeast, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west; Lake Tanganyika lies along its southwestern border. The political capital city is Gitega and the economic capital and largest city is Bujumbura.

The Twa, Hutu and Tutsi peoples have lived in Burundi for at least 500 years. For more than 200 of those years, Burundi was an independent kingdom. In 1885, it became part of the German colony of German East Africa. After the First World War and Germany's defeat, the League of Nations mandated the territories of Burundi and neighboring Rwanda to Belgium in a combined territory called Rwanda-Urundi. After the Second World War, this transformed into a United Nations Trust Territory. Burundi gained independence in 1962 and initially retained the monarchy. However, a coup d'état in 1966 replaced the monarchy with a one-party republic, and for the next 27 years, Burundi was ruled by a series of ethnic Tutsi dictators and notably experienced a genocide of its Hutu population in 1972. In July 1993, Melchior Ndadaye became Burundi's first Hutu president following the country's first multi-party presidential election. His assassination three months later during a coup attempt provoked the 12-year Burundian Civil War. In 2000, the Arusha Agreement was adopted, which was largely integrated in a new constitution in 2005. Since the 2005 post-war elections, the country's dominant party has been the Hutu-led National Council for the Defense of Democracy – Forces for the Defense of Democracy (CNDD–FDD), widely accused of authoritarian governance and perpetuating the country's poor human rights record.

Rwanda, officially the Republic of Rwanda, is a landlocked country in East Africa. Known as the "Land of a Thousand Hills" for its high elevation and rolling terrain, its geography is dominated by mountains in the west and savanna in the southeast. The largest and most notable lakes are mainly in the western and northern regions of the country, and several volcanoes that form part of the Virunga volcanic chain are primarily in the northwest. The climate is considered tropical highland, with two rainy seasons and two dry seasons each year. Its capital and largest city is Kigali, located at the centre of the country, at 1,567 metres above sea level.

Rwanda lies a few degrees south of the Equator in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, where the African Great Lakes and Southeast Africa converge. Going clockwise Rwanda is bordered by Uganda to the north, Tanzania to the east, Burundi to the south, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west.

The East African Rift (EAR) or East African Rift System (EARS) is an active continental rift zone in East Africa. The EAR began developing around the onset of the Miocene, 22–25 million years ago. It is considered to be part of a larger system, formerly known as the Great Rift Valley, that extends north to Asia Minor.

A narrow zone, the rift is a developing divergent tectonic plate boundary where the African plate is in the process of splitting into two tectonic plates, called the Somali plate and the Nubian plate, at a rate of 6–7 mm (0.24–0.28 in) per year. The rift system consists of three microplates, the Victoria microplate to the north, and the Rovuma and Lwandle microplates to the south. The Victoria microplate is rotating anti-clockwise with respect to the African plate. Its rotation is caused by the configuration of mechanically weaker and stronger lithospheric regions in the EARS.

The Afar triple junction is a triple junction located along a divergent plate boundary dividing the Nubian, Somali, and Arabian plates. This area is considered a present-day example of continental rifting leading to seafloor spreading and producing an oceanic basin. Here, the Red Sea Rift meets the Aden Ridge and the East African Rift. The latter extends a total of 6,500 kilometers (4,000 mi) from the Afar Triangle to Mozambique.

The connecting three arms form a triple junction. The northernmost branching arm extends north through the Red Sea and into the Dead Sea, while the eastern arm extends through the Gulf of Aden and connects to the Mid-Indian Ocean ridge further to the east. Both of these rifting arms are below sea level and are similar to a mid-ocean ridge.

Lake Assal (Arabic: بحيرة عسل Buḥayrah ʿAsal, lit. “Honey Lake”) is a crater lake in central-western Djibouti. It is located at the western end of Gulf of Tadjoura between Arta Region, and Tadjoura Region, touching Dikhil Region, at the top of the Great Rift Valley, some 120 km (75 mi) west of Djibouti city. Lake Assal is a saline lake that lies 155 m (509 ft) below sea level in the Afar Triangle, making it the lowest point on land in Africa and the third-lowest point on Earth after the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. No outflow occurs from the lake, and due to high evaporation, the salinity level of its waters is 10 times that of the sea, making it the fifth most saline body of water in the world, behind Garabogazköl, Lake Retba, Gaet'ale Pond and Lake Elton. The salt in the lake is exploited under four concessions awarded in 2002 at the southeast end of the lake; the major share of production (nearly 80%) is held by Société d’Exploitation du Lac and Société d’Exploitation du Salt Investment S.A de Djibouti.

The lake is a protected zone under Djibouti's National Environmental Action Plan of 2000. However, the law does not define the boundary limits of the lake. Since the exploitation of the salt from the lake was uncontrolled, the Plan has emphasized the need for managing the exploitation to avoid negative impact on the lake environment. The Government of Djibouti has initiated a proposal with UNESCO to declare the Lake Assal zone and the Ardoukoba volcano as a World Heritage Site.

The Olduvai Gorge or Oldupai Gorge in Tanzania is one of the most important paleoanthropological localities in the world; the many sites exposed by the gorge have proven invaluable in furthering understanding of early human evolution. A steep-sided ravine in the Great Rift Valley that stretches across East Africa, it is about 48 km (30 mi) long, and is located in the eastern Serengeti Plains within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in the Olbalbal ward located in Ngorongoro District of Arusha Region, about 45 kilometres (28 miles) from Laetoli, another important archaeological locality of early human occupation. The British/Kenyan paleoanthropologist-archeologist team of Mary and Louis Leakey established excavation and research programs at Olduvai Gorge that achieved great advances in human knowledge. The site is registered as one of the National Historic Sites of Tanzania.

The gorge takes its name from the Maasai word oldupai which means "the place of the wild sisal" as the East African wild sisal (Sansevieria ehrenbergii) grows abundantly throughout the gorge area. Twenty-five kilometers downstream of Lake Ndutu and Lake Masek, the gorge is the result of up to 90 m (300 ft) erosion cutting into the sediments of a Pleistocene lake bed. A side gorge, originating from Lemagrut Mountain, joins the main gorge 8 km (5.0 mi) from the mouth. This side gorge follows the shoreline of a prehistoric lake, rich in fossils and early hominin sites. Periodic flows of volcanic ash from Olmoti and Kerimasi helped to ensure preservation of the fossils in the gorge.

The Hula Valley (Hebrew: עמק החולה, romanized: ʿEmeq haḤūlā; Arabic: سهل الحولة, romanized: Sahl al-Ḥūlat) is a topographic depression forming a valley and fertile agricultural region in northern Israel with abundant fresh water that used to be part covered by marshland and Lake Hula. These areas were a breeding ground for mosquitoes carrying malaria and were drained in the 1950s. A small section of the valley was later reflooded in an attempt to revive a nearly extinct ecosystem. It is a major stopover for birds migrating along the Great Rift Valley between Africa, Europe, and Asia, with an estimated 500 million migrating birds now pass through the Hula Valley every year.