What Does Sea Floor Spreading Cause

When oceanic plates diverge tensional stress causes fractures to occur in the lithosphere.

What does sea floor spreading cause.

The mid atlantic ridge for instance separates the north american plate from the eurasian plate and the south american plate from the african plate the east pacific rise is a mid ocean ridge that runs through the eastern pacific ocean and separates the pacific plate from the north american. Sea floor spreading is what happens at the mid oceanic ridge where a divergent boundary is causing two plates to move away from one another resulting in spreading of the sea floor. In this way the rugged volcanic landscape of a mid ocean ridge is created along the plate boundary. As the plates move apart new material wells up and cools onto the edge of the plates.

Seafloor spreading is the usual process at work at divergent plate boundaries leading to the creation of new ocean floor. Seafloor spreading theory that oceanic crust forms along submarine mountain zones and spreads out laterally away from them. This idea played a pivotal role in the development of the theory of plate tectonics which revolutionized geologic thought during the last quarter of the 20th century. Gravity causes older denser oceanic crust to sink beneath less dense continental crust.

As two tectonic plates slowly separate molten material rises up from within the mantle to fill the opening. Down the middle of underwater mountain ranges is a device that scientist use to map the ocean floor. But despite their name these plains are not uniformly flat. Seafloor spreading occurs at a diversion boundary.

As upwelling of magma continues the plates continue to diverge a process known as 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. Seafloor spreading occurs along mid ocean ridges large mountain ranges rising from the ocean floor. The motivating force for seafloor spreading ridges is tectonic plate slab pull at subduction zones rather than magma pressure although there is typically. This seafloor spreading hypothesis had been proposed a few years earlier by harry hess a petrologist at princeton university and robert dietz an oceanographer in the us coast and geodetic.

They are interrupted by features like hills valleys and seamounts underwater mountains that are also hotspots for biodiversity. Sunlight does not penetrate to the sea floor making these deep dark ecosystems less productive than those along the continental shelf. The seafloor s permanent magnetic signatures showed that new ocean crust was created at the ridge crests and then spread outward in both directions. Where does sea floor spreading occur.

These age data also allow the rate of seafloor spreading to be determined and they show that rates.