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A new study looking at four plateaus in the western Pacific Ocean suggests that these expansive areas aren't rigid slabs but weak spots being yanked apart by distant forces at the plate's edge."We knew that geological deformations like faults happen on the continental plate interiors far from plate boundaries.
But we didn't know the same thing was happening to ocean plates,"For decades, scientists have been rewriting their understanding of the seafloor, so this new study is just a continuum of their efforts to chart the ocean's rugged topography.Rather, the seafloor was carved up by gaping trenches and massive mountains – none larger than the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which Tharp discovered, and is now recognized as thewhen two tectonic plates collide and Earth's crust buckles, or one plate dips under the other, thrusting the overtopping plate upward. Underwater, though, submarine mountains usually form as two plates drift apart at a so-called divergent boundary and magma spews out. But far away from these plate boundaries, at the center of oceanic plates, scientists thought that large sections of Earth's crust remained fairly rigid as they drifted atop the mantle, and did not deform like plate edges. To test this thinking, Gün, Pysklywec, and colleagues gathered existing data on two oceanic plateaus that lie between Japan and Hawaii called the Shatsky Rise and Hess Rise; the Ontong Java Plateau, north of the Solomon Islands; and the Manihiki Plateau, to the northeast of Fiji and Tonga. Given the challenges in surveying the seafloor, their study was limited to these four plateaus in the western Pacific Ocean for which data were available. Faults in four oceanic plateaus of the Pacific plate tend to run parallel to the nearest plate boundary . from the nearest subduction zone, to get a better understanding of the mechanisms giving rise to this distant deformation. The team's modeling results show oceanic plateaus are weak spots in Earth's crust that get stretched as the edge of the tectonic plate pulls downward at distant trenches. ( Regardless of their distance from the plate edge, these hypothetical plateaus were stretched over millions of years and thinned more on the side closest to the trench.Acknowledging they only analyzed four Pacific plateaus, the researchers hope their findings spur further explorations to map the seafloor.
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