The paper in "Geophysical Research Letters" being commented on (Birhanu et al, 2016) first came to the author's attention while reading "Africa's Big Break". (Hall, 2018) The comment begins by comparing failure or continued growth of rifts to tempering of glass - glass is reheated then suddenly cooled, making it tough enough to hammer nails into wood while still looking and feeling like ordinary glass. Then it talks about the stretching of crust in Africa's rift (revealed by GPS measurements) being partly the result of Einstein's interpretation of gravity. Finally, the comment's excursion from geophysics to astrophysics is repeated by changing focus from the crust and mantle to the core and magnetosphere. The comment proposes that production of Earth's magnetic field is not solely dependent on the standard geodynamo model but also relies on Faraday rotation into higher dimensions: with the proposal supported by spaceprobe observations of the planets Mercury, Venus and Mars.