Ancient Rock from Seafloor

Tom Kleindinst
July 24, 2024
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Image of a rock with grayish color and textured surface with irregular mossy green circles.
Tom Kleindinst

The studied rocks were collected from the Gakkel Ridge near the North Pole and the Southwest Indian Ridge between Africa and Antarctica, two of the slowest-spreading tectonic plate boundaries in the world. The slow pace of the spreading at these ocean ridges means that they are relatively quiet, volcanically speaking, compared to faster-spreading ridges that are peppered with volcanoes such as the East Pacific Rise. This means that rocks collected from these slow-spreading ridges are more likely to be samples of the mantle itself.

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