Southern Ocean (Antarctic) The Southern Ocean or Antarctic Ocean is not only the youngest ocean – it formed roughly 30 million years ago – but it is also the “newest” named ocean basin.
What is the world’s youngest ocean?
Indian Ocean, body of salt water covering approximately one-fifth of the total ocean area of the world. It is the smallest, geologically youngest, and physically most complex of the world’s three major oceans.
Where is the youngest seafloor found?
Where plates move apart, new crustal material is formed from molten magma from below the Earth’s surface. Because of this, the youngest sea floor can be found along divergent boundaries, such as the Mid-Atlantic Ocean Ridge.
What is the age of the seafloor?
Scientists use the magnetic polarity of the sea floor to determine the age. Very little of the sea floor is older than 150 million years. This is because the oldest sea floor is subducted under other plates and replaces by new surfaces.
What is the age of the youngest oceanic crust?
The ocean crust is everywhere younger than 200 million years (for example, less than 5% of the age of the earth). The crust is youngest (still being created by volcanic eruptions) along the axis of the mid-ocean ridges and increases in age down the flanks of the mid-ocean ridges and out onto the deeper basin floors.
What are the 7 Seven Seas?
The Seven Seas include the Arctic, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific, Indian, and Southern Oceans. The exact origin of the phrase ‘Seven Seas’ is uncertain, although there are references in ancient literature that date back thousands of years.
Which is the saltiest sea in the world?
Interesting Sea Facts:
The saltiest sea in the world is the Red Sea with 41 parts of salt per 1,000 parts of water.
How is seafloor created?
Seafloor spreading occurs at divergent plate boundaries. As tectonic plates slowly move away from each other, heat from the mantle’s convection currents makes the crust more plastic and less dense. The less-dense material rises, often forming a mountain or elevated area of the seafloor.
What happens to the oldest seafloor?
One place where the crust is the oldest is at edge of a subduction zone. It is here that the oldest ocean crust is pushed under a continental crust and destroyed. In the image below, the oldest oceanic crust is pink/purple. As you can see, the newest crust (red) is adjacent to where there is seafloor spreading.
Why do tectonic plates move?
The heat from radioactive processes within the planet’s interior causes the plates to move, sometimes toward and sometimes away from each other. This movement is called plate motion, or tectonic shift.
Are the continents floating on water?
There is no water under the continents. There is liquid rock under the continents; this is called the Earth’s mantle. It’s so hot that the rock is melted. That’s what the continents are floating on.
What is the longest continuous feature on Earth?
The mid-ocean ridge is the longest mountain range on Earth.
Spanning 40,389 miles around the globe, it’s truly a global landmark. About 90 percent of the mid-ocean ridge system is under the ocean. This system of mountains and valleys criss-crosses the globe, resembling the stitches in a baseball.
Why is there no ocean floor much older than 280 million years?
While the Earth’s continental crust can exist for billions of years, movement of tectonic plates causes subduction, which is when the ocean crust is shoved down into the molten mantle. So the ocean floor rarely lasts longer than 200 million years.
Where are the oldest rocks on Earth found?
Bedrock along the northeast coast of Hudson Bay, Canada, has the oldest rock on Earth. Canadian bedrock more than 4 billion years old may be the oldest known section of the Earth’s early crust.
Why don’t we feel the plates moving?
We don’t usually feel this movement because it is quite gradual – just a few millimetres every year. With time, the pressure of this movement builds up, and there is a sudden shift inside the Earth that we feel as an earthquake. … The Earth’s crust also has cracks. Scientists call these cracks tectonic plate boundaries.
How can you tell how old the oceanic crust is?
Traditionally, instruments aboard ships have predicted the age of the ocean’s crust by mapping these magnetic stripes, and then calculating an age using distance and time between polarity reversals within the crust, says Rodey Batiza, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Division of Ocean …