Ocean Floor Transform Faults

Marine transform faults and associated fracture zones mtffzs cover vast stretches of the ocean floor where they play a key role in plate tectonics accommodating the lateral movement of tectonic plates and allowing connections between ridges and trenches.

Ocean floor transform faults. Where plates diverge from each other molten magma flows upward between the plates forming mid ocean ridges underwater volcanoes hydrothermal vents and new ocean floor crust. About the same time morgan was forming his theory the canadian geologist and geophysicist j. Ocean floor maps like this one of the northern atlantic ocean clearly show that oceanic ridges have a series of steps called transform faults. A fracture zone is a linear oceanic feature often hundreds even thousands of kilometers long resulting from the action of offset mid ocean ridge axis segments.

Together with the continental counterparts of mtffzs these structures also pose a risk to human societies as they can generate high. To understand what these transform faults look like and how they move we need to know more about. They are a consequence of plate tectonics lithospheric plates on either side of an active transform fault move in opposite directions. The inactive portions of the fracture zone on the ridge flanks are scars on the ocean floor created in the transform faults.

Most examples of transform faults occur at mid ocean ridges at the bottoms of the world s oceans. Here strike slip activity occurs. Transform boundaries are faults that connect two areas where plates are converging or diverging. Fracture zones extend past the transform faults away from.

Which of the following is the predominant process that forms the thick blanket of sediment on abyssal plains the deep ocean floor. As the plates split apart they do so at differing speeds creating space anywhere from a few to several hundred miles between spreading margins. While most transform faults offset the mid ocean ridge system the best known transform faults are those on land e g san andreas dead sea. Tuzo wilson recognized the seismic nature of transform faults and other features and explained the phenomenon as a transfer of.

Transform faults move differently from a strike slip fault at the mid oceanic ridge. The edges of these continental boundaries usually form zig zag patterns. Instead of the ridges moving away from each other as they do in other strike slip faults transform fault ridges remain in the same fixed locations and the new ocean seafloor created at the ridges is pushed away from the ridge. The transform fault steps can also be seen in the offsets of magnetic stripes shown in this map of the oceanic ridges off western canada usa.

The oceanic transform faults have a cumulative length of almost 48 000 km and a mean velocity of 40 mm yr 1 bird 2003. Perpendicular to the ridge axis.