THE EXPANDING EARTH It is He Who stretched out the earth and placed firmly embedded mountains and riversin it and made two types of every kind of fruit. He covers over day with night. There are Signs in that for people who reflect. (Surat Ar-Ra‘d, 3) The Arabic term “madda al-arda” translated “as stretched out” in the above verse, means “to be covered, spread out, stretched, pulled out, expanded or opened.” The use of this word in the context of the earth in referring to the formation of mountains and rivers is exceedingly wise. Because looking at the scientific explanation of the formation of the earth, it does appear that mountains and rivers formed through the stretching and expansion of the earth. Modern science says that the earth had a very different appearance in the very earliest timesto that which it has now. In his book Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (The Origin of the Continents and Oceans) in 1915 the famous German scientist Alfred Lothar Wegener proposed that all the continents hadoriginally been one single land mass. This great land mass later came to be known by the Greek name Pangaea, meaning “all continents.1 According to Alfred Wegener's theory of “continental drift,” put forward in 1912, the continents at the two ends of the Atlantic Ocean are still moving away from one another. This theory assumed its latest, present-day state with the development of the field of science known as the tectonic plates: Continents do not move away from one another by sliding over the ocean floor. The ocean floor and the continents drift together over a layer of liquid magma under great heat and pressure and known as the “astenosphere” or “upper crust.” Therefore, both the land continents on earth visible fromthe outside and also the crust under the sea are both in motion together.2 Because the plates that bear the continents move in a manner described as contraction and expansion, or stretching, the continents are today moving away from one another at arate of 3 cm a year.3 The most evident expansion taking place on the sea bed is that between Arabia and Africa, where the continents are moving away from one another three or four times faster. When the expansion takes place on the continent, rather than on the sea bed, the result is constantly widening valleys such as the Great Rift Valley in the East Africa-Arabia regions. The Great Rift Valley is a geographical and geological formation stretching some 6000 km, from Sudan in North Africa to Mozambique in the east. The valley ranges from 30-100 km in width and is several thousand kilometers deep.4 This deep valley brought such formations as Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya into being as Africa and the Arabian Peninsula moved awayfrom one another over a process lasting millions of years. The eastern part of valley consists of the River Jordan, the Dead Sea andthe Gulf of Aqaba. It then extends southward along the Red Sea and various lakes in Kenya. Most of these lakes are very deep and below sea-level