Seafloor Spreading and Marine Magnetic Anomalies,
     six animations


This is a set of movies designed to elucidate the Vine-Matthews Hypothesis for the formation of marine magnetic anomalies. Magnetic stripes are observed over most of the world's deep ocean floors. This explanation for their creation was one of the most powerful drivers of the 1960's plate tectonics revolution that profoundly changed our understanding of Earth's processes and history.

In these movies, sea floor spreading is depicted on three spreading centers connected by transform faults, with a front-cut cross section. They were constructed to demonstrate spreading, transform faulting and fracture zones, magnetic polarity reversals, and the formation of seafloor magnetic stripes.

These conceptual presentations are shown occurring at a gently rifted spreading center (i.e., spreading at a slow-medium rate) with a stylized version of the linear fault blocks that are formed as the sea floor spreads. In the first three movies, the fault blocks are illuminated by light from the upper right. The fourth movie demonstrates the last few million years of the Earth's polarity reversal time scale. In the fifth and sixth movies, each strip of the sea floor is colored to show the polarity its magnetization: dark for normal polarity and light for reversed polarity.

You can download them all six of them as a package, or you can pick and choose individual movies to suit your purposes.



Download Seafloor Spreading Package of 6 movies (60 MB)


Individual Seafloor Spreading Animations:

To view these movies, click on their images.

Download:
SFS animation (13 MB)

Download:
SFS with spreading arrows (13 MB)

Download:
SFS with transform fault arrows (13 MB)

Download:
Magnetic polarity reversal explanation (1.5 MB)

Download: SFS with
magnetic stripes and reversal scale (13 MB)

Download:
SFS with magnetic stripes (13 MB)


Made by Tanya Atwater using Photoshop, Morph and Final Cut Pro with helpful comments from Ken MacDonald and Doug Burbank.


Comments on this and all of the materials offered on this site are welcomed: atwater@geol.ucsb.edu


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