What Causes Sea Floor Spreading

As each new centimeter is added and cools another takes its place.

What causes sea floor spreading.

Convection and conduction of heat from the core and through the mantle is what causes oceanic and continent rifts to form. The motivating force for seafloor spreading ridges is tectonic plate slab pull at subduction zones rather than magma pressure although there is typically significant magma activity at spreading ridges. Convection currents also recycle lithospheric materials back to the mantle. Mantle convection is the slow churn ing motion of earth s mantle.

The seafloor spreading hypothesis was proposed by the american geophysicist harry h. Sea floor spreading is caused by convection currents in the mantle to cause a divergent boundary underwater. He demonstrated that the ridges in the middle of the great oceans were the result of magma breaking through creating a divergent boundary where the seafloor spread apart. Convection of heat from the mantle and core that causes magma to house and.

Seafloor spreading helps explain continental drift in the theory of plate tectonics. It happens on both sides of the ridge so the sea floor is spreading in both directions. Seafloor spreading and other tectonic activity processes are the result of mantle convection. This is how new oceanic crust is created.

As upwelling of magma continues the plates continue to diverge a process known as seafloor spreading. When the divergent boundary spreads it caues a mid ocean ridge. This is sea floor. In the 1960s a geologist named harry hess was able to show how the seafloor spread when magma rose to the surface.

And then cool and modify while posing and being pulled sideways. The great rift valley is a co rental purist that will become a n8ew sea. Sea floor spreading is caused by a ridge opening in the earths crust where new magma lava rises up and adds to the sea floor. 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.

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.