Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Oceanic crust is formed at an oceanic ridge, while the lithosphere is subducted back into the asthenosphere at trenches. Oceanic trenches are prominent, long, narrow topographic depressions of the ocean floor. They are typically 50 to 100 kilometers (30 to 60 mi) wide and 3 to 4 km (1.9 to 2.5 mi) below the level of the surrounding oceanic ...
The Mariana Trench is an oceanic trench located in the western Pacific Ocean, about 200 kilometres (124 mi) east of the Mariana Islands; it is the deepest oceanic trench on Earth. It is crescent-shaped and measures about 2,550 km (1,580 mi) in length and 69 km (43 mi) in width.
The Mariana Trench is the deepest known submarine trench, and the deepest location in the Earth's crust itself. [38] It is a subduction zone where the Pacific Plate is being subducted under the Mariana Plate. [3] At the deepest point, the trench is nearly 11,000 m deep (almost 36,000 feet).
The Tonga Trench constitutes the northern half of the Tonga-Kermadec subduction system, which extends 2,550 km (1,580 mi) between New Zealand and Tonga. [1] The Tonga Trench is an oceanic trench located in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It is the deepest trench in the Southern hemisphere and the second deepest on Earth after the Mariana Trench.
Others, such as rift valleys or oceanic trenches, are created by geological movement of tectonic plates. Some oceanic trenches include the Mariana Trench and the Aleutian Trench. [2] [3] The former geoform is relatively deep (approximately 10 kilometres (6.2 mi)), linear and narrow, and is formed by plate subduction when plates converge. [4]
The trench is also a part of the Chile triple junction, an unusual junction that consists of a mid-oceanic ridge and the Chile Rise being subducted under the South American plate at the Peru–Chile Trench. Two seamount ridges within the Nazca plate enter the subduction zone along this trench: the Nazca Ridge and the Juan Fernández Ridge.
The Drake is part of the most voluminous ocean current in the world, with up to 5,300 million cubic feet flowing per second. Squeezed into the narrow passage, the current increases, traveling west ...
Some of the earliest explorations of the trench occurred in the late 1950s when Robert L. Fisher, a research geologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, investigated the trench as part of a worldwide scientific field exploration of the world's ocean floor and sub-oceanic crustal structure. Bomb-sounding, echo-train analysis, and ...