Sea Floor Spreading Essay

Sea floor spreading essay 336 words 2 pages.

Sea floor spreading essay.

Seafloor spreading occurs along mid ocean ridges large mountain ranges rising from the ocean floor. The hypo thesis of sea floor spreading was first formulated by the late professor harry hess of princeton university in 1960. Sea floor spreading seafloor spreading is a theory discovered in the 1960s by a student in princeton university named harry hess. Seafloor spreading theory that oceanic crust forms along submarine mountain zones and spreads out laterally away from them.

Harry hess had a different perspective on how things worked in the seafloor setting. Part of his mission had been to study the deepest parts of the ocean floor. This idea played a pivotal role in the development of the theory of plate tectonics which revolutionized geologic thought during the last quarter of the 20th century. In 1946 he had discovered that hundreds of flat topped mountains perhaps sunken islands shape the pacific floor.

Sea floor spreading and plate boundaries are not a common subject to anyone outside of a scientific or marine biology lab. He conjointly recognized that the temperature concerning the middle atlantic ridge was hotter than the surface removed from it. The man who discovered sea floor spreading was harry hess. Compare and contrast ideas behind plate tectonics and the theory of the continental drift.

The sea floor is geologically very young not more than 160 million years old only 1 30th of the age of the earth. This seafloor spreading hypothesis had been proposed a few years earlier by harry hess a petrologist at princeton university and robert dietz an oceanographer in the us coast and geodetic survey the federal department that made maps of the oceans and us coastlines. After much thought he proposed in 1960 that the movement of the. Hess went on to say that as the ocean crust spreads and cools over millions.

The mid atlantic ridge for instance separates the north american plate from the eurasian plate and the south american plate from the african plate the east pacific rise is a mid ocean ridge that runs through the eastern pacific ocean and separates the pacific plate from the north american. By the utilization of the echo sounder hess was ready to map the ocean bottom and discovered the middle atlantic ridge mid ocean ridge. According to hess hypothesis seafloor spreading is a process where the upwelling.