Picture a neon-colored desert painted in yellow, green, and rusty orange, covered in acid and salt, sitting 125 meters below sea level. It looks like a dying toxic wasteland, but it is actually a nursery: the embryonic stage of a brand new ocean.

This episode takes you to the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia and Eritrea, one of the hottest and most extreme places on Earth, to explain how continents physically break apart. We trace the tectonic engine pulling the plates apart, the chemistry behind the surreal Dallol springs, and the extremophile life that thrives in conditions that should be lethal.

• How adiabatic decompression melts solid rock into magma as the crust stretches like taffy at 8 to 18 millimeters per year
• The split personality of the valley: fiery volcanoes with no continental crust in the south, brittle faulting and 500-meter salt beds in the north
• Why the Red Sea flooded the basin at least four times, and how rain and rivers concentrated half a kilometer of salt
• The poly-extreme Dallol springs, where iron and chlorine sulfates create neon chimneys and acid pools
• Gadel Pond, the saltiest water on Earth at 43 percent, born almost overnight from a 2005 earthquake