Sea Floor Spreading Science Project

In the places where the plates are moving apart magma liquid rock moves up into the cracks and solidifies making a new ocean floor just like cake batter would ooze up through.

Sea floor spreading science project.

This idea played a pivotal role in the development of the theory of plate tectonics which revolutionized geologic thought during the last quarter of the 20th century. As upwelling of magma continues the plates continue to diverge a process known as seafloor spreading samples collected from the ocean floor show that the age of oceanic crust increases with distance from the spreading centre important evidence in favour of this process. Let s explore another idea called seafloor spreading. In this section we are going to take alfred wegener s thoughts a little further.

Spreading rate is the rate at which an ocean basin widens due to seafloor spreading. Purchase this seafloor spreading activity at teachers pay teachers for 1 50 cents. In this experiment you ll make a seafloor spreading model to learn more about how plate tectonics work and create mid ocean ridges. Basalt the once molten rock that makes up most new oceanic crust is a fairly magnetic substance and scientists began using magnetometers to measure the magnetism of the ocean floor in the 1950s what they discovered was that the magnetism of the ocean floor around.

Sea floor spreading happens at places where plates are moving away from each other and where the liquid rock from the asthenosphere can come up to the lithosphere. Seafloor spreading theory that oceanic crust forms along submarine mountain zones and spreads out laterally away from them. The magnetism of mid ocean ridges helped scientists first identify the process of seafloor spreading in the early 20th century. Seafloor spreading is the mechanism for wegener s drifting continents.

Click here if you are a student at snowflake heber or holbrook to access the susd5 student version of seafloor spreading assignment. These age data also allow the rate of seafloor spreading to be determined and they show that rates. Spreading rates determine if the ridge is fast intermediate or slow. The rate at which new oceanic lithosphere is added to each tectonic plate on either side of a mid ocean ridge is the spreading half rate and is equal to half of the spreading rate.