1) Describe the bathymetry of the ocean seafloor and how the features relate to plate tectonics.
The bathymetry of the ocean floor is the shape of the ocean floor. On the ocean floor there are also anomalies, gravity and magnetism in different areas of the ocean. “We know these things because it has been mapped out using a process called sonar, Sound Navigation and Ranging. This is done by creating sound waves from a ship at the surface that bounce down off of the seafloor and then come back up. There have actually been a variety of techniques. One of the most important has been side scan sonar that is actually able to map to fine details of the shapes of the ocean seafloor.” (Wysession, teachingcompany.12.forumer.com; 2008)
“Ocean bathymetry, to the people involved with early mapping, was a total surprise for a wide variety of reasons.” (Wysession, teachingcompany.12.forumer.com; 2008) “When you look at a lake you know that the deepest parts of that lake will be out away from the shore, perhaps on the very middle. The areas around the back are usually the shallowest. This is not the case in the ocean. In the ocean, the deepest places are the ocean trenches which are found at the edges of continents.
It turned out that in the middle of the ocean there are mid-ocean ridges that formed this long continuous chains of mountains that are all connected. The mid-Atlantic ridge connects to the east Pacific rise, and the Indian ridge, and in all three principle oceans these represent spreading of plates on either side. Now the different ridges behave differently in the different oceans, largely as a function of the rate they are spreading. The mid-Atlantic ridge represents a location of fairly slow plate spreading.” (Wysession, teachingcompany.12.forumer.com; 2008) “North America and South America are moving fairly slowly away from Europe and Africa. In the east Pacific