Age Of Ocean Floor Map

New sea floor map for google earth january 13 2016 in late 2014 we had a look at a map of the ocean floor published by the scripps institution of oceanography university of california san diego.

Age of ocean floor map.

One of the most famous world maps is the 1977 world ocean floor map see above created by bruce heezen and marie tharp a pioneering female oceanographer and kick ass female scientist. Note that the youngest seafloor ages are found at the mid ocean spreading ridges where new rock is constantly coming up from under the crust to heal the rifts formed as tectonic plates move away from one another. Therefore seafloor dating isn t that useful for studying plate motions beyond the cretaceous. The problem with that approach is that our oceans are vast and ships are small meaning only a tiny percentage of the ocean floor between 5 15 percent nasa estimates was mapped.

Sio reference series 93 30 scripps institution of oceanography. Images and animations depicting the crustal age of the ocean floor created by the noaa national centers for environmental information ncei from bathymetric topographic and marine geological and geophysical data. We ve come a long way in ocean exploration since the days of the hms challenger launched in 1858. Ige table 5r below indicates the entire surface of the planet is rising outwardly at the present accelerating rate of 2 85 cm each year 6378 96 km.

The 1977 world ocean floor map created by bruce heezen and marie tharp. For that geologists date and study continental crust. To complete a map of earth s ocean floor you ve got to take to the high seas by boat. Seafloor age millions of years 0 20 40 60 80 0 8 this map builds on the tectonic plates map by adding seafloor age data.

A digital age map of the ocean floor. Prior to the publication of this map scientists had very little idea of what the seafloor looked like on a global. This dataset shows the age of the ocean floor along with the labeled tectonic plates and boundaries. Contours of 20 million years are available as a layer that is currently set to invisible.

The data is from four companion digital models of the age age uncertainty spreading rates and spreading asymmetries of the world s ocean basins. The magma located under the solid crust is lifting the continents and the ocean floor s. Because of this correlation between age and subduction potential very little ocean floor is older than 125 million years and almost none of it is older than 200 million years.