Sea Floor Spreading Occurs In Places Where Two Plates Are

As the plates divide magma comes up through the crack and cools to form new sea floor.

Sea floor spreading occurs in places where two plates are. If seafloor spreading drives the plates what drives seafloor spreading. The farther away the floor is from. A place where two plates move away from each other leaving an opening in between where magma can well up. 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.

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. Picture two convection cells side by side in the mantle similar to the illustration in figure 3. These areas are named triple junctions and can be found in several places across the world today. 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 was proposed by an american geophysicist harry h. Seafloor spreading occurs when two tectonic plates move further away from each at mid ocean ridges. Seafloor spreading occurs at the boundary between two tectonic plates. As upwelling of magma continues the plates continue to diverge a process known as seafloor spreading 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.

Seafloor spreading takes place at the boundaries of divergent plates whereby as the divergent tectonic plates move away from each other hot convectional currents from the mantle cause the lithosphere the ocean crust to become less dense ductile and brittle and therefore rise above the surrounding crust to form a submarine mountain. Hot mantle from the two adjacent cells rises at the ridge axis creating new ocean crust. Seafloor spreading is a process that occurs at mid ocean ridges. These age data also allow the rate of seafloor spreading to be determined and they show that rates.

Seafloor spreading theory that oceanic crust forms along submarine mountain zones and spreads out laterally away from them. In locations where two plates move apart at mid ocean ridges new seafloor is continually formed during seafloor spreading. In these ridges new crust is formed through volcanic activity and thus expanding the seafloor.