Seafloor Spreading - Debate and Search For Mechanism

Debate and Search For Mechanism

At the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (and other places), material from the upper mantle rises through the faults between oceanic plates to form new crust as the plates move away from each other, a phenomenon first observed as continental drift. When Alfred Wegener first presented a hypothesis of continental drift in 1912, conservative geologists, especially in North America, demanded to know where the motive force could possibly lie. Wegener suggested that the continents ploughed through the ocean crust.

Since then, it has been shown that the motion of the continents is linked to seafloor spreading. In the 1960s, the past record of geomagnetic reversals was noticed by observing the magnetic stripe "anomalies" on the ocean floor. This results in broadly evident "stripes" from which the past magnetic field polarity can be inferred by looking at the data gathered from simply towing a magnetometer on the sea surface or from an aircraft. The stripes on one side of the mid-ocean ridge were the mirror image of those on the other side. The seafloor must have originated on the Earth's great fiery welts, like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the East Pacific Rise.

The driver for seafloor spreading in plates with active margins the weight of the cool, dense, subducting slabs that pull them along. The magmatism at the ridge is considered to be "passive upswelling", which is caused by the plates being pulled apart under the weight of their own slabs. This can be thought of as analogous to a rug on a table with little friction: when part of the rug is off of the table, its weight pulls the rest of the rug down with it.