Rift Zone Ocean Floor

Hydrothermal vents are common at spreading centers.

Rift zone ocean floor. Mauna loa on hawaii provides a textbook example of this kind of rift zone. Below is a map of the main hawaiian islands showing rift zones in red lines and volcanic centers as red squares. An instructive example is iceland which has very productive geothermal resources because it is located on the mid ocean rift zone of the atlantic ocean.

A rift zone is one of the most important tectonically active zones on the earth s surface. Rift valleys differ from river valley s and glacial valley s in that they are created by tectonic activity and not the process of erosion. The vast flat lands that cover the bottom of the deep open ocean.

Systems of cracks in the ocean floor through which magma rises. There are a number of distinctive geological features that are associated with rift zones on shield volcanoes. A mid ocean ridge mor is a seafloor mountain system formed by plate tectonics it typically has a depth of 2 600 meters 8 500 ft and rises about two kilometers above the deepest portion of an ocean basin this feature is where seafloor spreading takes place along a divergent plate boundary the rate of seafloor spreading determines the morphology of the crest of the mid ocean ridge and its.

Rift valleys are found both on land and at the bottom of the ocean where they are created by the process of seafloor spreading. A rift zone can occur when two of earth s tectonic plates are moving away from each other. The rift zones conspicuously do not point towards adjacent volcanoes but instead parallel the volcano volcano boundaries.

Mountain chains that form along the rift zones. A deep narrow valley in the ocean floor. As a result iceland has comparatively easy access to large very high quality geothermal resources.

Radiating away from the summits of hawaiian volcanoes are usually two linear rift zones. Rift zones mark preferred directions of sub horizontal magma excursions from the magma chamber. On the continents rift valleys form in divergence zones of tectonic plates.