Describe The Hypothesis Of Sea Floor Spreading

Compare sea floor spreading with the formation of mid ocean ridges sea floor spreading is the process where two ocean plates move apart from each other.

Describe the hypothesis of sea floor spreading.

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. The break fills in with magma because the oceanic crust is not very thick and it is right above the magma filled mantle. Harry hess s hypothesis about seafloor spreading had collected several pieces of evidence to support the theory. Only four years after the maps with the zebra pattern of magnetic stripes were published the link between sea floor spreading and these patterns was correctly placed independently by lawrence morley and by fred vine and drummond matthews in 1963 now called the vine matthews morley hypothesis.

Wikimedia commons has media related to sea floor spreading. Describe the hypothesis of sea floor spreading. Sea floor spreading is when there is a break in the oceanic crust called a ridge caused by the plates moving apart. 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.

The seafloor spreading hypothesis was proposed by the american geophysicist harry h. On the basis of tharp s efforts and other new discoveries about the deep ocean floor hess postulated that molten material from earth s mantle continuously wells up along the crests of the mid ocean ridges that wind for nearly 80 000 km. In 1912 when alfred wegener proposed that the continents had once been joined together and had split apart the biggest weakness in his hypothesis was the. This evidence was from the investigations of the molten material seafloor drilling radiometric age dating and fossil ages and the magnetic stripes.

Divergent boundary linear feature that exists between two tectonic plates that are moving away from each other vine matthews morley hypothesis the first key scientific test of the seafloor spreading theory of continental drift and plate tectonics. Mid ocean ridges are underwater mountain ranges that typically occur at the center of an area of sea floor spreading. Seafloor spreading occurs along mid ocean ridges large mountain ranges rising from the ocean floor.