Sea Floor Spreading Essay

Sea floor spreading essay 336 words 2 pages.

Sea floor spreading essay.

Sea floor spreading seafloor spreading is a theory discovered in the 1960s by a student in princeton university named harry hess. Harry hess had a different perspective on how things worked in the seafloor setting. He conjointly recognized that the temperature concerning the middle atlantic ridge was hotter than the surface removed from it. Seafloor spreading occurs along mid ocean ridges large mountain ranges rising from the ocean floor.

By the utilization of the echo sounder hess was ready to map the ocean bottom and discovered the middle atlantic ridge mid ocean ridge. Seafloor spreading theory that oceanic crust forms along submarine mountain zones and spreads out laterally away from them. Essay on seafloor spreading was projected by an american geologist harry in 1960. The sea floor is geologically very young not more than 160 million years old only 1 30th of the age of the earth.

In 1946 he had discovered that hundreds of flat topped mountains perhaps sunken islands shape the pacific floor. 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. After much thought he proposed in 1960 that the movement of the. This seafloor spreading hypothesis had been proposed a few years earlier by harry hess a petrologist at princeton university and robert dietz an oceanographer in the us coast and geodetic survey the federal department that made maps of the oceans and us coastlines.

Compare and contrast ideas behind plate tectonics and the theory of the continental drift. The man who discovered sea floor spreading was harry hess. Harry hess was a geologist. The hypo thesis of sea floor spreading was first formulated by the late professor harry hess of princeton university in 1960.

Hess went on to say that as the ocean crust spreads and cools over millions. Part of his mission had been to study the deepest parts of the ocean floor. 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.