Dating the Growth of Oceanic Crust at a Slow-Spreading Ridge High quality online dating

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The crust that makes up the bottom of the world’s oceans is constantly being generated along mid-ocean ridges, mountain ranges that look like the seams of a baseball on the seafloor. A new study that examined some of the minerals that make up new ocean crust suggests that the formation process may be slower and less uniform than previously thought. Mid-ocean ridges are the boundaries between tectonic plates and are the place where the plates spread apart from each other. Magma from the underlying mantle erupts at the edges, then cools and solidifies to form new ocean crust. This new crust is gradually pushed away from the ridge by more new crust, eventually traveling the across the plate — a process called seafloor spreading — and back into the Earth’s interior at a subduction zone, where one tectonic plate dives beneath another. The speed of crust formation varies from ridge to ridge: Some fast-spreading ridges produce up to 6 inches 15 centimeters of new crust per year, while slower-spreading ridges creep along at just 2 inches 5 cm per year.