Ocean Floor Seafloor Spreading

Which reveal the features of the ocean floor as if the water were taken away.

Ocean floor seafloor spreading. Samples collected from the ocean floor show that the age of oceanic crust increases with distance from the spreading centre important evidence in favour of this process. Public broadcasting service sea floor spreading hypothesis. Click on the image to reveal the magnetic view which. The map view depicts the visible appearance of the oceanic crust.

The rate at which new oceanic lithosphere is added to each tectonic plate on either side of a mid ocean ridge is the spreading half rate and is equal to half of the spreading rate. For instance the atlantic ocean is believed to be expanding because of its few trenches. Such magnetic patterns led to recognition of the occurrence of sea floor spreading and they remain some of the strongest evidence for the theory of plate tectonics. Even scientist were amazed that the seafloor was not completely flat.

Subduction and sea floor spreading are processes that could alter the size and form of the ocean. Sea floor spreading in the theory of plate tectonics the process by which new oceanic crust is formed by the convective upwelling of magma at mid ocean ridges resulting in the continuous lateral displacement of existing oceanic crust. These age data also allow the rate of seafloor spreading to be determined and they show that rates vary from about 0 1 cm 0 04 inch per year to 17 cm 6 7 inches per year. I couldn t understand the same topic from ncerts rajtanil man s videos.

The seafloor was mapped by shipborne magnetometers in the 1950s and produced puzzling results sequential zones of normal and reverse magnetic polarity spreading. It s the best platform i ever came across to understand physical geography. It didn t provide dates or chemical analyses of the ocean floor but it did uncover long oceanic ridges steep canyons and many other landforms that are indicators of plate tectonics. The figure below includes two images of the ocean floor.

What was discovered was a large chain of. Resource library encyclopedic entry resource library encyclopedic entry seafloor spreading seafloor spreading seafloor spreading is a geologic process in which tectonic plates large slabs of earth s lithosphere split apart from each other. Spreading rate is the rate at which an ocean basin widens due to seafloor spreading.