Sea Floor Spreading Evidence For Continental Drift

Seafloor spreading disproves an early part of the theory of continental drift.

Sea floor spreading evidence for continental drift.

The matching of the distribution of similar fossils across oceans. Tuzo said that earth s crust or lithosphere was divided into large rigid pieces called plates. Plates are composed of lithosphere about 100 km thick that float on the ductile asthenosphere. Supporters of continental drift originally theorized that the continents moved drifted through unmoving oceans.

Whats people lookup in this blog. These plates float atop an underlying rock layer called the asthenosphere. Tuzo wilson combined the continental drift and seafloor spreading hypotheses to propose the theory of plate tectonics. The existence of mid ocean ridges where seafloor spreading starts b.

Seafloor spreading evidence for continental drift. See also continental drift a veritable legion of evidence supports the seafloor spreading hypothesis. Fellow scientists at the time thought the theory was ludicrous. 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.

He suggested that continents moved around the earth like giant rafts. By combining the sea floor spreading theory with continental drift and information on global seismicity the new theory of plate tectonics became a coherent theory to explain crustal movements. This evidence was from the investigations of the molten material seafloor drilling radiometric age dating and fossil ages and the magnetic stripes. Harry hess s hypothesis about seafloor spreading had collected several pieces of evidence to support the theory.

In 1965 a canadian geophysicist j. How did seafloor spreading provide evidence for continental drift. Which of the following lines of evidence for continental drift plate tectonics was found after wegener published his theory. 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 proves that the ocean itself is a site of tectonic activity. This evidence however was also used to support the theory of continental drift. Studies conducted with thermal probes for example indicate that the heat flow through bottom sediments is generally comparable to that through the continents except over the mid ocean ridges. Evidence of similar paleoclimates in belts across pangaean latitudes.

In 1963 fred vine and d h. Matthews used paleomagnetism to test the theory of seafloor spreading by studying paleomagnetic data from a portion of the midocean ridge system if the seafloor has spread laterally by the addition of new crust at the oceanic ridges there should be a relatively symmetrical pattern of magnetic orientation normal polarity reversed polarity normal polarity and.