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Tectonics

Mantle spread across the sea floor

Nature Geoscience volume 6, pages 247–248 (2013)Cite this article

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The sea floor around mid-ocean ridges is often carpeted by hummocky lava flows. Images from the Southwest Indian Ridge sea floor, however, show a smooth texture created by exhumation and widespread exposure of altered mantle rocks.

New sea floor is created at mid-ocean ridges, where tectonic plates spread apart. The gap forming between the diverging plates is plugged with upwelling magma that feeds lava flows on the sea floor and creates new oceanic crust. Spreading can also occur through stretching out the existing oceanic lithosphere along faults. The relative role of magmatism versus faulting varies depending on the speed at which the plates separate. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Sauter et al.1 show that at the ultra-slow-spreading Southwest Indian Ridge magmatism has been virtually absent over the past 11 million years, and seafloor spreading was instead accommodated by extension of the lithosphere along giant faults that have exhumed large swathes of altered mantle rocks.

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Figure 1: Models of plate spreading.

References

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  1. Deborah Smith is in the Department of Geology and Geophysics, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Woods Hole, Massachusetts 02543, USA,

    Deborah Smith

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  1. Deborah Smith
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Correspondence to Deborah Smith.

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Smith, D. Mantle spread across the sea floor. Nature Geosci 6, 247–248 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1786

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