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Marine geological studies were of extreme importance in providing the critical evidence for sea floor spreading and plate tectonics in the years following World War II. The deep ocean floor is the last essentially unexplored frontier and detailed mapping in support of economic ( petroleum and metal mining ), natural disaster mitigation, and ...
The Vine–Matthews–Morley hypothesis, also known as the Morley–Vine–Matthews hypothesis, was the first key scientific test of the seafloor spreading theory of continental drift and plate tectonics. Its key impact was that it allowed the rates of plate motions at mid-ocean ridges to be computed.
The cooling mantle model, which was developed after the plate model, does not require that the lithosphere base is maintained at a constant and limiting temperature. The result of the cooling mantle model is that seafloor depth is predicted to be proportional to the square root of its age.
The seabed (also known as the seafloor, sea floor, ocean floor, and ocean bottom) is the bottom of the ocean. All floors of the ocean are known as 'seabeds'. The structure of the seabed of the global ocean is governed by plate tectonics. Most of the ocean is very deep, where the seabed is known as the abyssal plain. Seafloor spreading creates ...
World War II in the Pacific led to great improvements of bathymetry, particularly in the western Pacific. In light of these new measurements, the linear nature of the deeps became clear. There was a rapid growth of deep sea research efforts, especially the widespread use of echosounders in the 1950s and 1960s. These efforts confirmed the ...
Earlier theories by Alfred Wegener and Alexander du Toit of continental drift postulated that continents in motion "plowed" through the fixed and immovable seafloor. The idea that the seafloor itself moves and also carries the continents with it as it spreads from a central rift axis was proposed by Harold Hammond Hess from Princeton University and Robert Dietz of the U.S. Naval Electronics ...
These plates are often grouped with an adjacent principal plate on a tectonic plate world map. For purposes of this list, a microplate is any plate with an area less than 1 million km 2 . Some models identify more minor plates within current orogens (events that lead to a large structural deformation of Earth's lithosphere ) like the Apulian ...
Relief map with the East Pacific Rise (shown in light blue), extending south from the Gulf of California. The East Pacific Rise (EPR) is a mid-ocean rise (usually termed an oceanic rise and not a mid-ocean ridge due to its higher rate of spreading that results in less elevation increase and more regular terrain), at a divergent tectonic plate boundary, located along the floor of the Pacific Ocean.