SEAFLOOR SPREADING THEORY MAGNETIC REVERSAL - Final

Lesson 2- Evidence of Plate Movements:
Seafloor Spreading Theory
➢ SONAR (1930) is a sounding gear that produce

new evidence of what the seafloor looked like as
the sound waves bounced off the seafloor to
determine its depth and features.
What did Harry Hess and his men accidentally discover

when they explored the oceanic floor? Were they able to
locate the start of all the movements on the Earth's surface?
Moreover, did the Harry Hess team gather much strong
evidence to support the claim that continents are drifting?
• It happened that the command of
one attack transport ship, the USS
Cape Johnson, was given to Harry
Hammond Hess, a geologist from
Princeton University.
• Hess, then in his late thirties,
wanted to continue his scientific
investigations even while at war.
• So he left his ship's sounding gear
all of the time, not just when
approaching port or navigating a
difficult landing. What Hess
discovered was a big surprise.
• discovered that the bottom of the sea was not as
smooth as expected, but full of canyons,
trenches, and volcanic sea mountains
• realized that the Earth's crust had been moving
away on each side of oceanic ridges, down the
Atlantic and Pacific oceans, long and
volcanically active
• observed that the rate of formation of new
seafloor at the mid-ocean ridge is not always as
fast as the destruction of the old seafloor at the
subduction zone
• explains why the Pacific Ocean is getting smaller
and why the Atlantic Ocean is getting wider. If
the subduction zone is faster than the seafloor
spreading, the ocean shrinks
• History of Ocean Basins (1962), and it came to
be called "seafloor spreading."
• In the center of every mid-ocean ridges is a riff
where magma rises to the top forming new
ocean floor, which pushes the older ocean floor
laterally away from the ridge.
• Eventually, this dense oceanic crust runs into
less dense continental crust, which result in its
subduction and subsequent melting back into
magma.
• The reason the rift exist, as Hess discovered, is
because each side of the ridge is being pulled
in opposite directions by underlying convection
currents in the mantle. This phenomenon is
referred to as the theory of seafloor spreading
and it explains how continental drift works.
• Landmasses don’t “plow” through the ocean as
earlier theories suggested, but rather they are
dragged by convection currents along with the
rest of the sea floor.
Lesson 3 - Evidence of Plate Movements: Magnetic Reversal
• In 1963, as geophysicists realized

that Earth's magnetic field had
reversed polarity many times, with
each reversal lasting less than
200,000 years.
• Rocks of the same age in the
seafloor crust would have taken on
the magnetic polarity at the time that
part of the crust formed.
• Sure enough, surveys of either side
of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge showed a
symmetrical pattern of alternating
polarity stripes.
• The occurrence of the magnetic reversal or "magnetic flip“ can be
explained through the magnetic patterns in the magnetic rocks. These
magnetic patterns allow our scientists to understand the ages and rate
of movement of the materials from the mid-oceanic ridge.
• It happens when the North Pole
is transformed into the South
Pole, and the South Pole
becomes the North Pole. This
event happens because of the
changing direction of the flow of
materials in the Earth's liquid
outer core.
• Over the last 10 million years,
there had been an average of 4
to 5 reversals per million years.
New rocks are added to the
ocean floor at the ridge with
approximately equal amounts
on both sides of the oceanic
ridge.
FINDINGS THAT SUPPORT
SEAFLOOR SPREADING THEORY
• Rocks are younger at the mid-ocean ridge.
• Rocks far from the mid-ocean ridge are older.
• Sediments are thinner at the ridge.
• Rocks at the ocean floor are younger than those at
the continents.
• Patterns of seafloor magnetism on either side of
mid-ocean ridges match up with one another.

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Lesson 2- Evidence of Plate Movements:

Seafloor Spreading Theory

➢ SONAR (1930) is a sounding gear that produce

What did Harry Hess and his men accidentally discover

• In 1963, as geophysicists realized

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