What is a fracture zone in the ocean?
What is a fracture zone in the ocean?
Fracture zones are valleys that cut across midocean ridges, thus providing a passage for flow of cold bottom water from one ocean basin to another.
Where is the oceanic fracture zone?
mid-ocean ridges
Fracture zones are common features in the geology of oceanic basins. Globally most fault zones are located on divergent plate boundaries on oceanic crust. This means that they are located around mid-ocean ridges and trend perpendicular to them.
What boundary is a fracture zone?
The fracture zones are not plate boundaries. The crust on both sides of a fracture zone are part of the same plate and moving in the same direction (see below). Fracture zones exist as bathymetric features extending many hundreds of kilometers from the midocean ridge.
Why do fracture zones form?
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. They are a consequence of plate tectonics.
Is the Galapagos fracture zone a divergent plate boundary?
These structures are seen in the GTJ area, implying that not only divergent boundaries are present but smaller convergent/transform as well. Determining relative ages of the geology in the area is challenging due to consistent volcanic activity along spreading ridges and trenches bordering each plate boundary.
Which zone is the area on which final fracture occurs?
The Blanco Fracture Zone is a fracture zone running between the Juan de Fuca Ridge and the Gorda Ridge. The dominating feature of the fracture zone is the 150 km long Blanco Ridge, which is a high-angle, right-lateral strike slip fault with some component of dip-slip faulting.
How are fracture zones like the eltanin created?
How are fracture zones like the Eltanin created? They are the scars on the seafloor basalt that are created by offsets in the mid-ocean ridge. -Different segments of the mid-ocean ridge system spreading at different rates.
What is a continental fracture zone?
What are the three stages of ductile fracture?
There has been a large amount of experimental evidencel – 7 ) to show that ductile fracture process of ma terials consists of three stages, i.e., ini tia tion, growth and coalescence of voids, and second-phase particles play an important role as sites of void initiation.
Where is the Owen Fracture Zone in the Indian Ocean?
The Owen Fracture Zone ( OFZ ), though misnamed a fracture zone, is a transform fault in the northwest Indian Ocean that separates the Arabian and African Plates from the Indian Plate. Extending north-northeast from where the Carlsberg Ridge meets the Sheba ridge in the south to the Makran Subduction Zone in…
Where are the fractures in the Pacific Ocean?
Most fracture zones in the Pacific Ocean originate from large mid-ocean ridges (also called “rises”) such as the East Pacific Rise, Chile Rise and Juan de Fuca Ridge. The plates that host the fractures are Nazca, Pacific, Antarctic, Juan de Fuca and Cocos among others.
Where are the meridional ridges in the Indian Ocean?
Other important meridional aseismic ridges include the Chagos-Laccadive, Madagascar, and Mozambique plateaus, which are not part of the global oceanic ridge system. The fracture zones of the Indian Ocean offset the axis of the oceanic ridges mostly in a north-south direction.
Where are fracture zones located in the earths crust?
Fracture zones are common features in the geology of oceanic basins. Globally most fault zones are located on divergent plate boundaries on oceanic crust.