Sea Floor Spreading And Subduction Diagram

In seafloor spreading magma moves from the asthenosphere to the crust.

Sea floor spreading and subduction diagram.

Spreading rate is the rate at which an ocean basin widens due to seafloor spreading. The purpose of this activity is to make a simple model that shows the evolution of oceanic crust through sea floor spreading and subduction. Spreading rates determine if the ridge is fast intermediate or slow. Seafloor spreading is just one part of plate tectonics.

These age data also allow the rate of seafloor spreading to be determined and they show that rates. The creation of new sea floor at mid ocean spreading centers and its destruction in subduction zones is one of the many cycles that causes the earth to experience constant change. This report describes how to build a model of the outer 300 km 180 miles of the earth that can be used to develop a better understanding of the principal features of plate tectonics including sea floor spreading the pattern of magnetic stripes frozen into the sea floor transform faulting thrust faulting subduction and volcanism. Regions where this process occurs are known as subduction zones rates of subduction are typically measured in centimeters per year with the average rate of convergence being.

Oceanic crust thin parts of the earth s crust located under the oceans. Ocean large bodies of water sitting atop oceanic crust. Subduction is a geological process that takes place at convergent boundaries of tectonic plates where one plate moves under another and is forced to sink due to high gravitational potential energy into the mantle. The rate at which new oceanic lithosphere is added to each tectonic plate on either side of a mid ocean ridge is the spreading half rate and is equal to half of the spreading rate.

Subduction and sea floor spreading are processes that could alter the size and form of the ocean. Subduction happens where tectonic plates crash into each other instead of spreading 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. At subduction zones the edge of the denser plate subducts or slides beneath the less dense one.

Due to this continuous seafloor spreading occurs and makes atlantic ocean floor to be connected to other continental crust making the ocean gets wider over the time. The denser lithospheric material then melts back into the earth s mantle. For instance the atlantic ocean is believed to be expanding because of its few trenches.