Originating in brand new 1950s, scientists such as for example Winner Vacquier, having fun with magnetized tool (magnetometers) adjusted out of airborne gadgets developed throughout the The second world war so you’re able to find submarines, first started acknowledging weird magnetized distinctions along the water flooring. Which in search of, although unanticipated, wasn’t totally alarming as it try known that basalt-brand new iron-steeped, eruptive stone making up the sea floors-includes a firmly magnetic mineral (magnetite) and certainly will locally distort compass indication. Whenever recently designed material cools, such magnetic material registered the brand new Planet’s magnetic job during the time.

As more and more of one’s seafloor is mapped inside the 1950s, the newest magnetized distinctions turned out not to getting random otherwise separated incidents, but alternatively found recognizable patterns. Whenever these magnetized activities was mapped over an extensive area, the ocean floors demonstrated a beneficial zebra-such development: you to stripe that have typical polarity additionally the surrounding stripe having reversed polarity. The overall pattern, discussed from the this type of changing groups of generally speaking and you can reversely polarized rock, turned known as magnetized striping, and you may is written by Ron G. Mason and co-specialists inside the 1961, exactly who didn’t pick, even though, a reason for these analysis with regards to sea floor spreading, particularly Vine, Matthews and Morley a couple of years after.

The brand new finding of magnetic striping called for a reason. During the early sixties boffins for example Heezen, Hess and you may Dietz had begun to theorise you to middle-water ridges mark structurally poor areas in which the sea floor is actually becoming torn in two lengthwise along the ridge crest (see the previous paragraph). 자세히 보기