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Spreading rate is the rate at which an ocean basin widens due to seafloor spreading. (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). Spreading rates determine if the ridge is fast, intermediate, or slow.
This feature is where seafloor spreading takes place along a divergent plate boundary. The rate of seafloor spreading determines the morphology of the crest of the mid-ocean ridge and its width in an ocean basin. The production of new seafloor and oceanic lithosphere results from mantle upwelling in response to plate separation.
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 ...
A seafloor map will show a rather strange pattern of blocky structures that are separated by linear features perpendicular to the ridge axis. If one views the seafloor between the fracture zones as conveyor belts carrying the ridge on each side of the rift away from the spreading center the action becomes clear.
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 ...
Basalt pillow lava from Juan de Fuca Ridge. The Juan de Fuca Ridge was at one point a part of the larger Pacific-Farallon ridge system. Approximately 30 million years ago, the Farallon Plate, being driven outwards by the Pacific-Farallon ridge, was pushed underneath the North American Plate, splitting what remained into the Juan de Fuca Plate to the North and the Cocos Plate and Nazca Plate to ...
An abyssal plain is an underwater plain on the deep ocean floor, usually found at depths between 3,000 meters (9,800 ft) and 6,000 meters (20,000 ft).Lying generally between the foot of a continental rise and a mid-ocean ridge, abyssal plains are among the flattest, smoothest and least explored regions on Earth. [1]
With a seafloor spreading rate of about 20–40 km/million years, this represents a sediment accumulation rate of approximately 100–200 m every 25–50 million years. [1] The diagram at the start of this article ↑ shows the distribution of the major types of sediment on the ocean floor. Cosmogenous sediments could potentially end up in any ...