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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 ...
Marine geology or geological oceanography is the study of the history and structure of the ocean floor. It involves geophysical, geochemical, sedimentological and paleontological investigations of the ocean floor and coastal zone. Marine geology has strong ties to geophysics and to physical oceanography.
Oceanic trenches are prominent, long, narrow topographic depressions of the ocean floor. They are typically 50 to 100 kilometers (30 to 60 mi) wide and 3 to 4 km (1.9 to 2.5 mi) below the level of the surrounding oceanic floor, but can be thousands of kilometers in length.
Benthic organisms can be divided into two categories based on whether they make their home on the ocean floor or a few centimeters into the ocean floor. Those living on the surface of the ocean floor are known as epifauna. [13] Those who live burrowed into the ocean floor are known as infauna. [10]
GEBCO is the only intergovernmental body with a mandate to map the whole ocean floor. At the beginning of the project, only 6 per cent of the world's ocean bottom had been surveyed to today's standards; as of June 2022, the project had recorded 23.4 per cent mapped. About 14,500,000 square kilometres (5,600,000 sq mi) of new bathymetric data ...
Magnetic anomalies off west coast of North America. Dashed lines are spreading centers on mid-ocean ridges. The Vine–Matthews-Morley hypothesis correlates the symmetric magnetic patterns seen on the seafloor with geomagnetic field reversals. At mid-ocean ridges, new crust is created by the injection, extrusion, and solidification of magma.
A bathymetric chart is a type of isarithmic map that depicts the submerged bathymetry and physiographic features of ocean and sea bottoms. [1] Their primary purpose is to provide detailed depth contours of ocean topography as well as provide the size, shape and distribution of underwater features.
Along with this, if the seafloor spreading rate in an ocean basin increases, then the average depth in that ocean basin decreases and therefore its volume decreases (and vice versa). This results in global eustatic sea level rise (fall) because the Earth is not expanding. Two main drivers of sea level variation over geologic time are then ...