Sea Floor Of The Earth

The latest status of its seabed 2030 project was announced to coincide with world hydrography day.

Sea floor of the earth.

The google earth data right is clearly higher resolution than that version of the scripps map left. On average oceanic crust is only 6 to 7km thick compared to 35 to 40km for con tinental crust. The ocean floor has the same general character as the land areas of the world. Basalt the once molten rock that makes up most new oceanic crust is a fairly magnetic substance and scientists began using magnetometers to measure the magnetism of the ocean floor in the 1950s what they discovered was that the magnetism of the ocean floor around.

The sea floor then drops off steeply along the continental slope the true edge of the continent. In the 1960s earth scientists developed the theory of plate tectonics. Plate tectonics and the ocean floor. The magnetism of mid ocean ridges helped scientists first identify the process of seafloor spreading in the early 20th century.

The smooth flat regions that make up 40 of the ocean floor are the abyssal plain. The ocean basins are characterized not only by lying in deep water the ocean floor averages about 4km below sea level but also by being underlain by a thin layer of crust. The scripps sea floor map has also been used to discover a new microplate in the indian ocean. This program traces the development of plate tectonics beginning with the contributions and methods of geologist alfred wegener.

The lack of weathering and erosion in most areas however allows geological processes to be seen more clearly on the seafloor than on land. Exploration of the seafloor and the earth s crust. 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 50 000 miles through all the world s oceans. Look at figure 14 23.

9 10 this results in broadly evident stripes from which the past magnetic field polarity can be inferred from data gathered with a magnetometer towed on the sea surface or from an aircraft. Sea floor spreading continental drift paleomagnetism and the primordial supercontinent pangaea are some of the topics covered. In the 1960s the past record of geomagnetic reversals of earth s magnetic field was noticed by observing magnetic stripe anomalies on the ocean floor. If you follow the ocean floor out from the beach at the top left the seafloor gently slopes along the continental shelf.