He identified the presence of mid ocean ridges and that ocean trenches are where ocean floor is destroyed and recycled.
Sea floor speading 1957 1962.
The lava cools to form new seafloor.
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.
Harry hess published the history of ocean basins in 1962 outlining a theory of how tectonic plates can move which was later called sea floor spreading.
First proposed in the early 1960s by the american geologist harry h.
Mid ocean ridges form long mountain chains that rise up and adds material to the seafloor.
Seafloor spreading occurs along mid ocean ridges large mountain ranges rising from the ocean floor.
For instance the atlantic ocean is believed to be expanding because of its few trenches.
Seafloor spreading adds more crust to the earths surface that is under the ocean.
Hess wrote that hot magma rises up into the rift valley at the mid ocean ridges.
Later more lava erupts at the ridge.
Hess proposed that the seafloor was created at mid ocean ridges spreading in both directions from the ridge system.
Due to this continuous seafloor spreading occurs and makes atlantic ocean floor to be connected to other continental crust making the ocean gets wider over the time.
Seafloor spreading is a process that occurs at mid ocean ridges where new oceanic crust is formed through volcanic activity and then gradually moves away from the ridge.
Hess its major tenets gave great support to the theory of continental drift continental drift geological theory that the relative positions of the continents on the earth s surface have.
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.
In 1962 harry h.
Spreading rate is the rate at which an ocean basin widens due to seafloor spreading.
Subduction and sea floor spreading are processes that could alter the size and form of the ocean.
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.
Seafloor spreading theory that oceanic crust forms along submarine mountain zones and spreads out laterally away from them.
Seafloor spreading helps explain continental drift in the theory of plate tectonics when oceanic plates diverge tensional stress causes fractures to occur in the lithosphere.
Seafloor spreading theory of lithospheric evolution that holds that the ocean floors are spreading outward from vast underwater ridges.