Seafloor spreading
Expansión del fondo oceánico
- Date
- 1960-1963 · confidence high
- Place
- Princeton University, United States (Hess) / Cambridge, United Kingdom (Vine and Matthews)
- Credited to
- Harry Hess (1962), Robert Dietz (1961), Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews (1963), Lawrence Morley
- People
- 👤 Drummond Matthews1931–1997👤 Frederick Vine1939–2024👤 Lawrence Morley1920–2013👤 Robert Dietz1949–
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
Hess proposed that the seafloor is created at ridges and destroyed at trenches; Vine and Matthews showed that symmetrical magnetic stripes on either side of the ridges record the reversals of the field, confirming it. This gave Wegener the mechanism he had lacked.
Coordinates of Princeton, where Hess wrote 'History of Ocean Basins'. Morley reached the same conclusion as Vine and Matthews, but his paper was rejected.
What it led to
- Plate tectonics
- Dating of the seafloor (never older than 180 Ma)
- Ocean drilling (Glomar Challenger, 1968)
Built on
- Geomagnetic reversals1906 / 1929 / 1963
- Mid-Atlantic Ridge and rift valley (Tharp and Heezen)
- Magnetic reversals
- Mantle convection currents (Holmes, 1929)
Made possible
- Plate tectonics1965-1968
- Hydrothermal vents and chemosynthetic ecosystems1977
- Marine magnetometry
- Ocean drilling programme