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Abyssal hills formed by stretching oceanic lithosphere

Nature volume 392, pages 272–275 (1998)Cite this article

Abstract

Tectonic plates are formed and move apart at mid-ocean ridges. Some portion of this plate-separation process can occur by stretching of the crust, resulting in a complex pattern of extensional faults. Abyssal hills, the most ubiquitous topographic features on Earth1, are thought to be a product of this faulting2,3. Here we report the results of a self-consistent numerical model of lithospheric formation and stretching that includes spontaneous fault creation. In this model, an axial valley develops where the fault activity is most concentrated. The ‘frozen’ fault-generated topography, rafted out of the axial valley, is visually and statistically similar to observed abyssal hills formed at many slower-spreading ridges. Faults appear to be replaced by new faults because their offset changes the local stress field. We accordingly need no temporal variation in magmatism, as required by some previous models4,5,6, to control the spacing or offset of faults. Our model results suggest instead that the irregularity of abyssal hill relief may result from a self-organized critical stress state at spreading centres.

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Figure 1: Ridge-parallel abyssal-hill topography.
Figure 2: Details of model used.
Figure 3: Cross-section of strain rate (in colour with scale at base of image), velocity (as white arrows) and topography (with vertical exaggeration of 10) for two amounts of horizontal offset in a representative calculation.
Figure 4: Sequence of model topographic profiles for the same case illustrated in Fig. 3.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Lin and J. Goff for reviews. This work was supported by NSF and CNRS.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, Palisades, 10964, New York, USA

    W. Roger Buck

  2. Laboratoire de Géophysique et Tectonique, CNRS UMR 5573, Université Montpellier II, Montpellier Cedex 05, France

    Alexei N. B. Poliakov

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Correspondence to W. Roger Buck.

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Buck, W., Poliakov, A. Abyssal hills formed by stretching oceanic lithosphere. Nature 392, 272–275 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/32636

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