The Ocean Floor
The ocean floor is the surface that occurs at the bottom of an ocean. Many geologists refer to the ocean floor as seabed in their descriptions. The seabed physical phenomenon is common in most of the oceans, and it is created from tectonic movement and sediment from other various sources. The benthic zone is the surface that is closely near to the sea floor. At the benthic region, there is a community of animals that have been identified by geologists to be living there. Seabed consists of physical features such as the typical topography, soil composition, water layers, and sedimentation that are formed by various geographical processes.
The ocean floor physical structure is as a result of the plate tectonic geographical process. The tectonic plates are large sections of rocks that appear like spherical jig-saw puzzle floating on the top of the Earth’s hot flowing mantle. The tectonic plates are found at the earth’s lithosphere level (Schmeling, 3934). The convection currents form in the molten earth’s mantle carry a lot of heat to the tectonic plates at the lithosphere. The heat caused by the mantle convection currents causes the tectonic plates to move about the earth few centimeters every year. After many years of the process, the tectonic plates interact at their edges resulting in the various ocean floor features. The shifting plates may move towards one another, move away from one another, or even slide past each other. When the shifting plates move towards each other, they are said to be converging, and in the process, one plate can dive under the other causing deep ocean trenches such as the Marina Trench. When the shifting plates pull away from each other, they are said to be diverging, and magma flows upwards between the plates forming the mid-ocean ridges. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is an example of an ocean floor formed by this diverging process of the tectonic plates. Exploration on the ocean floor has discovered marine life on the seabed.
Various species of marine animals living on the ocean floor have been discovered in the last decades. The animals favor the ocean floor as their habitat because of the geographical processes that take place at the seabed. The animals’ habitats on the ocean floor are dependent on the processes resulting from the tectonic plate movements, cold water seeps, and underwater volcanoes. When the tectonic plates slide over each other, space is left between the plate. The space left has been discovered as an ecological niche for these animal species living on the seabed. The discovery of the hydrothermal vent in 1977 at the sea bed is one of the great discoveries to have been made by the ocean floor explorations. Since this discovery, satellites, submarines, and robots are currently being used to explore the ocean floor, and more scientific discoveries about the ocean floor await the future generations.
In sum, the ocean floor is famously referred to as seabed by many geologists, and it is the surface that occurs at the bottom of an ocean. The ocean floor is a physical phenomenon that is present in most of the earth’s oceans. The ocean floor structure is formed by plate tectonic movement process. Convectional currents from the earth’s mantle cause the tectonic plates to drift towards each other or away from each other. Depending on whether the tectonic plates diverge or converge to one another, different ocean floor structures are formed. Ocean floor explorations have discovered various species that exist on the surface of the ocean. Submarines, robots, and satellites are forms of new technology currently being used to explore the ocean floor
Works Cited
Schmeling, Harro, Gabriele Marquart, and Viktor Nawa. “The role of hydrothermal cooling of the oceanic lithosphere for ocean floor bathymetry and heat flow.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth 122.5 (2017): 3934-3952.