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Seafloor spreading

Portrait of a magma chamber

Nature volume 406, pages 578–579 (2000)Cite this article

About 20 km3 of new ocean crust is formed each year along the spreading centres of the global mid-ocean-ridge system. These spreading centres are usually not simple, linear structures, but are broken into offset and sometimes overlapping segments. Most of the molten rock (melt or magma) that solidifies into ocean crust resides within shallow magma chambers beneath the axes of the ridges before erupting at the seafloor or ‘freezing’ onto the edges of the separating tectonic plates.

Not surprisingly, the relationship between crustal magma chambers, the segmentation of spreading centres, and the supply of melt from the underlying mantle is still poorly understood. On page 614 of this issue, in a paper that constitutes an important step towards improving that understanding, Kent and co-workers1 present the first three-dimensional seismic reflection images of a mid-ocean-ridge magma system. Their study focuses on the East Pacific Rise near 9° 03′ N, about 500 km off the coast of Mexico.

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Figure 1: View looking north along the East Pacific Rise.
Figure 2: Mid-ocean-ridge magma chambers in three dimensions.

S. TIGHE

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  1. the Department of Geology and Geophysics, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole , 02543, Massachusetts, USA

    Robert S. Detrick

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  1. Robert S. Detrick
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Correspondence to Robert S. Detrick.

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Detrick, R. Portrait of a magma chamber. Nature 406, 578–579 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35020671

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