Sentences with phrase «of oceanic crust»

Sometimes, the island will sink due to its own weight and the nature of the oceanic crust upon which it is sitting.

If that's the reason, it could be because the crust is about 25 kilometers thick, resembling continental crust, compared with the 5 to 10 kilometers of oceanic crust elsewhere.

This, researchers say, suggests that a significant proportion of the oceanic crust alterations long attributed to a chemical - physical process may stem from a biological one.

In 2010 scientists from Oregon State and other institutions drilled into the gabbroic layer — the deepest layer of the oceanic crust, close to the hot, mineral - rich mantle — to find a host of bacterial species capable of gobbling up hydrocarbons from an unknown source.

Its strength resulted from the abrupt release of plate tectonic forces, a process known as subduction, centered on an area beneath Honshu where it slides over the top of oceanic crust.

Cycling of oceanic crust through mantle reservoirs can therefore explain observations of different recycled oceanic crustal ages and explain the chemical complexity of hotspot lavas.

But the Triassic is too old: Those pieces of oceanic crust have long since slid under the edges of continents and melted into magma.

The bulk of the plate is made of oceanic crust, a relatively light layer of rock that floats on the denser mantle like a boat floating on water.

Rather than focusing on the surface expression of the abyssal hills, he and his colleagues suggest that researchers hunting for signals from climate cycles use seismic imaging at the base of the oceanic crust, where much of the new sea floor accretes and rapid pulses of magma might be more observable.

With the oceanic plate, water enters the earth as it is trapped in minerals of the oceanic crust or overlaying sediments.

Over time, great slabs of oceanic crust were pulled down, or subducted, into the Earth's mantle.

Their flatness is the result of the accumulation of a blanket of sediments — sometimes up to 5 kilometers thick — which overlies the basaltic rocks of the oceanic crust.

Roughly 60 % of the Earth's outer surface is composed of oceanic crust formed by volcanic processes at mid-ocean ridges.

In the months before an October 2011 eruption, magma from the upper mantle accumulated in a layer of oceanic crust 6 to 10 miles below sea level.

That would have required more knowledge, in particular, of the nature of the oceanic crust and seismology than would become available until the 1950s.

@Aashish Loknath Panigrahi: Yes, there are some plates that only consist of oceanic crust (especially in the Pacific); but more relevant is that all the continental plates also have portions of oceanic crust.