Sea Floor Spreading And Plate Tectonic Evidence

Strong evidence of seafloor spreading and plate tectonics.

Sea floor spreading and plate tectonic evidence. By the use of the sonar hess was able to map the ocean floor and discovered the mid atlantic ridge mid. Theory of plate tectonics. The mid ocean ridge is where the seafloor spreading occurs in which tectonic plates large slabs of earth s lithosphere split apart from each other. Seafloor spreading is just one part of plate tectonics.

When the concept of seafloor spreading came along scientists recognized that it was the mechanism to explain how continents could move around earth s surface. As upwelling of magma continues the plates continue to diverge a process known as seafloor spreading. Subduction happens where tectonic plates crash into each other instead of spreading apart. Like the scientists before us we will now merge the ideas of continental drift and seafloor spreading into the theory of plate tectonics.

The theory maintains that the crust and uppermost mantle or lithosphere is segmented into a number of solid rigid slabs called lithospheric plates. Stripes of magnetic material in the seafloor provide strong evidence for tectonic theory. The stripes alternate between those with magnetic material orientated toward magnetic north and those oriented in the opposite direction. 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.

Paleomagnetism led the revival of the continental drift hypothesis and its transformation into theories of sea floor spreading and plate tectonics. Seafloor spreading is the mechanism behind this phenomenon. Seafloor spreading was proposed by an american geophysicist harry h. 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.

At subduction zones the edge of the denser plate subducts or slides beneath the less dense one. By the 1950s geologists geophysicists seismologists oceanographers and physicists had accumulated a large body of data about the ocean floor and the underlying crust. These age data also allow the rate of seafloor spreading to be. The regions that hold the unique record of earth s magnetic field lie along the mid ocean ridges where the sea floor is spreading.

The denser lithospheric material then melts back into the earth s mantle. Theory of plate tectonics the evidence among the many gaps in scientific knowledge at the time of alfred wegener was an understanding of the dynamics of the ocean floors.