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Most mid-ocean ridges of the world are connected and form the Ocean Ridge, a global mid-oceanic ridge system that is part of every ocean, making it the longest mountain range in the world. The continuous mountain range is 65,000 km (40,400 mi) long (several times longer than the Andes , the longest continental mountain range), and the total ...
Spreading rate is the rate at which an ocean basin widens due to seafloor spreading. (The rate at which new oceanic lithosphere is added to each tectonic plate on either side of a mid-ocean ridge is the spreading half-rate and is equal to half of the spreading rate). Spreading rates determine if the ridge is fast, intermediate, or slow.
This was sufficient to allow computing of spreading rates over the last 700,000 years on many mid-ocean ridges by locating the closest reversed crust boundary to the crest of a mid-ocean ridge. [11] Marine magnetic anomalies were found later to span the vast flanks of the ridges. [9]
The Juan de Fuca Ridge is a mid-ocean spreading center and divergent plate boundary located off the coast of the Pacific Northwest region of North America, named after Juan de Fuca. The ridge separates the Pacific Plate to the west and the Juan de Fuca Plate to the east. It runs generally northward, with a length of approximately 500 kilometres ...
Separating the African (or Nubian–Somali plates) and Antarctic plates, the Southwest Indian Ridge (SWIR) stretches 7,700 km (4,800 mi) from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean. With an average spreading rate of 14–15 millimetres per year (0.55–0.59 in/year), the SWIR is one of the slowest-spreading mid-ocean ridges on Earth.
A sheeted dyke complex, or sheeted dike complex, is a series of sub-parallel intrusions of igneous rock, forming a layer within the oceanic crust. [1] At mid-ocean ridges, dykes are formed when magma beneath areas of tectonic plate divergence travels through a fracture in the earlier formed oceanic crust, feeding the lavas above and cooling ...
New oceanic crust forming continuously at the crest of the mid-ocean ridge cools and becomes increasingly older as it moves away from the ridge crest with seafloor spreading. In 1960, the American geophysicist Harry H. Hess hypothesized that the seafloor was spreading from the mid-ocean ridge system. [ 6 ]
The East Pacific Rise near Easter Island is the fastest spreading mid-ocean ridge, with a spreading rate of over 15 cm/yr. [2] The Pacific plate moves generally towards the northwest at between 7 and 11 cm/yr while the Juan De Fuca plate has an east-northeasterly movement of some 4 cm/yr. [3]