The Crust Under The Ocean Floor
Oceanic crust covers about 60 percent of the earth s surface.
The crust under the ocean floor. New rock is formed by magma at the mid ocean ridges and the ocean floor spreads out from this point. Plate tectonics plate tectonics seafloor spreading. Oceanic crust is born at the mid ocean ridges where plates are pulled apart. Oceanic crust is about 6 km 4 miles thick.
The oldest existing oceanic crust is in the ionian sea part of the eastern mediterranean basin. Magma oozes up from the mantle through a crack in the ocean floor filling in the space between the plates and spreading out from the plate boundary. The seafloor of the ionian sea is about 270 million years old. Oceanic crust is thin and young no more than about 20 km thick and no older than about 180 million years.
Two types of crust make up the land on earth and its ocean floor. 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. The crust under land is thicker and contains more rock types. As upwelling of magma continues the plates continue to diverge a process known as seafloor spreading.
The continental crust covers only one third of the earth s surface and makes up all of the dry land found on earth. It is light and brittle and can break. The oldest parts of continental crust on the other hand are more than 4 billion years old. It is composed of several layers not including the overlying sediment.
Continental crust earth. Subduction zone the place where one plate is getting bent and pulled under the edge of another plate. Everything older has been pulled underneath the continents by subduction. The destruction of oceanic crust occurs at subduction zones where oceanic crust is forced under either continental crust or oceanic crust.
Structure of the earth. Only a small portion of the oceanic crust produced in the atlantic is subducted. A symmetrical pattern of positive and negative magnetic lines emanates from the mid ocean ridge. Oceanic crust the outermost layer of earth s lithosphere that is found under the oceans and formed at spreading centres on oceanic ridges which occur at divergent plate boundaries.
The oceanic crust displays a pattern of magnetic lines parallel to the ocean ridges frozen in the basalt. Today the atlantic basin is actively spreading at the mid atlantic ridge. Largely due to subduction oceanic crust is much much younger than continental crust.