What Does Sea Floor Spreading Cause

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.

What does sea floor spreading cause.

Seafloor spreading helps to explain continental drift in the theory of plate tectonics. Seafloor spreading theory that oceanic crust forms along submarine mountain zones and spreads out laterally away from them. They are interrupted by features like hills valleys and seamounts underwater mountains that are also hotspots for biodiversity. In this way the rugged volcanic landscape of a mid ocean ridge is created along the plate boundary.

But despite their name these plains are not uniformly flat. Where does sea floor spreading occur. A deep ocean trench is an underwater. 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.

Seafloor spreading is the usual process at work at divergent plate boundaries leading to the creation of new ocean floor. Down the middle of underwater mountain ranges is a device that scientist use to map the ocean floor. Seafloor spreading occurs along mid ocean ridges large mountain ranges rising from the ocean floor. Seafloor spreading occurs at a diversion boundary.

Sunlight does not penetrate to the sea floor making these deep dark ecosystems less productive than those along the continental shelf. 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. When oceanic plates diverge tensional stress causes fractures to occur in the lithosphere. Gravity causes older denser oceanic crust to sink beneath less dense continental crust.

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. 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. The motivating force for seafloor spreading ridges is tectonic plate slab pull at subduction zones rather than magma pressure although there is typically. The seafloor s permanent magnetic signatures showed that new ocean crust was created at the ridge crests and then spread outward in both directions.

At this point tectonic plates pull away from each other and the gaps fills with magma from the mantle.