Sea Floor Spreading And Plate Tectonic Evidence

Seafloor spreading as upwelling of magma continues the plates continue to diverge a process known as seafloor spreading.

Sea floor spreading and plate tectonic evidence.

As upwelling of magma continues the plates continue to diverge a process known as seafloor spreading. Stripes of magnetic material in the seafloor provide strong evidence for tectonic theory. Like the scientists before us we will now merge the ideas of continental drift and seafloor spreading into the theory of plate tectonics. Seafloor spreading is just one part of plate tectonics.

The theory maintains that the crust and uppermost mantle or lithosphere is segmented into a number of solid rigid slabs called lithospheric plates. Seafloor spreading was proposed by an american geophysicist harry h. Seafloor spreading is the mechanism behind this phenomenon. Subduction happens where tectonic plates crash into each other instead of spreading apart.

By the use of the sonar hess was able to map the ocean floor and discovered the mid atlantic ridge mid. The regions that hold the unique record of earth s magnetic field lie along the mid ocean ridges where the sea floor is 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. These age data also allow the rate of seafloor spreading to be.

Strong evidence of seafloor spreading and plate tectonics. Paleomagnetism led the revival of the continental drift hypothesis and its transformation into theories of sea floor spreading and plate tectonics. The denser lithospheric material then melts back into the earth s mantle. By the 1950s geologists geophysicists seismologists oceanographers and physicists had accumulated a large body of data about the ocean floor and the underlying crust.

By the 1960s the theories of continental drift and sea floor spreading were supported by reliable scientific data and combined to develop modern day plate tectonic theory. Theory of plate tectonics. 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. 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.

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. Plate tectonics plate tectonics seafloor spreading.