What Does Sea Floor Spreading Cause

Gravity causes older denser oceanic crust to sink beneath less dense continental crust.

What does sea floor spreading cause.

Down the middle of underwater mountain ranges is a device that scientist use to map 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. 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. A deep ocean trench is an underwater. Sunlight does not penetrate to the sea floor making these deep dark ecosystems less productive than those along the continental shelf. 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 theory that oceanic crust forms along submarine mountain zones and spreads out laterally away from them. The seafloor s permanent magnetic signatures showed that new ocean crust was created at the ridge crests and then spread outward in both directions. But despite their name these plains are not uniformly flat. 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.

Seafloor spreading occurs at a diversion boundary. Where does sea floor spreading occur. They are interrupted by features like hills valleys and seamounts underwater mountains that are also hotspots for biodiversity. 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.

Seafloor spreading occurs along mid ocean ridges large mountain ranges rising from the ocean floor. At this point tectonic plates pull away from each other and the gaps fills with magma from the mantle. These age data also allow the rate of seafloor spreading to be determined and they show that rates. Seafloor spreading helps to explain continental drift in the theory of plate tectonics.

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