| Home | About | Contact | Site Map | Links | Library |
Unique Home Furniture, Home Decorating and Home Decoration Store
Ocean Floor That:
This outward movement could push continental blocks apart or push previous ocean Floor rocks beneath the continents, which would explain the comparatively young age of the rocks on the ocean floor. In the Pacific Ocean, for example, the new ocean Floor seems to spread outward from a great ridge known as the East Pacific Rise. As the new Floor moves outward, the older seabed ahead of it should be forced downward into the deep trenches that ring the Pacific Ocean.Assuming that the newly forming crust at oceanic ridges picked up the prevailing polarity signal of the earth's magnetic field, the result over a long period of time would be strips of ocean Floor that were alternately normally and reversely magnetized. The correspondence between the patterns on the ocean Floor and the known history of the earth's magnetic field is too remarkable to be due to chance [4].
The implications of sea-floor spreading for the theory of continental drift are obvious; the mid-ocean ridges could be the points away from which the continents migrate. Movement of the sea floor, however, is at present only an observed fact; it does not provide us with an explanation of how solid continents can drift apart.
.
