Sea Floor Spreading And Plate Tectonic Evidence

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.

Sea floor spreading and plate tectonic evidence.

These age data also allow the rate of seafloor spreading to be. Strong evidence of seafloor spreading and plate tectonics. The denser lithospheric material then melts back into the earth s mantle. Seafloor spreading is the mechanism behind this phenomenon.

Stripes of magnetic material in the seafloor provide strong evidence for tectonic theory. As upwelling of magma continues the plates continue to diverge a process known as seafloor spreading. By the 1950s geologists geophysicists seismologists oceanographers and physicists had accumulated a large body of data about the ocean floor and the underlying crust. Seafloor spreading as upwelling of magma continues the plates continue to diverge a process known as seafloor spreading.

The regions that hold the unique record of earth s magnetic field lie along the mid ocean ridges where the sea floor is spreading. Seafloor spreading was proposed by an american geophysicist harry h. 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. Theory of plate tectonics.

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. Plate tectonics plate tectonics seafloor spreading. Subduction happens where tectonic plates crash into each other instead of spreading apart. The theory maintains that the crust and uppermost mantle or lithosphere is segmented into a number of solid rigid slabs called lithospheric plates.

By the use of the sonar hess was able to map the ocean floor and discovered the mid atlantic ridge mid. 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. At subduction zones the edge of the denser plate subducts or slides beneath the less dense one.

Paleomagnetism led the revival of the continental drift hypothesis and its transformation into theories of sea floor spreading and plate tectonics. Seafloor spreading is just one part of plate tectonics.