ocean basin

ocean basin, any of several vast submarine regions that collectively cover nearly three-quarters of Earth’s surface. Together they contain the overwhelming majority of all water on the planet and have an average depth of almost 4 km (about 2.5 miles). A number of major features of the basins depart from this average—for example, the mountainous ocean ridges, deep-sea trenches, and jagged, linear fracture zones. Other significant features of the ocean floor include aseismic ridges, abyssal hills, and seamounts and guyots. The basins also contain a variable amount of sedimentary fill that is thinnest on the ocean ridges and usually thickest near the continental margins.

General features

While the ocean basins lie much lower than sea level, the continents stand high—about 1 km (0.6 mile) above sea level. The physical explanation for this condition is that the continental crust is light and thick while the oceanic crust is dense and thin. Both the continental and oceanic crusts lie over a more uniform layer called the mantle. As an analogy, one can think of a thick piece of styrofoam and a thin piece of wood floating in a tub of water. The styrofoam rises higher out of the water than the wood.

The ocean basins are transient features over geologic time, changing shape and depth while the process of plate tectonics occurs. The surface layer of Earth, the lithosphere, consists of a number of rigid plates that are in continual motion. The boundaries between the lithospheric plates form the principal relief features of the ocean basins: the crests of oceanic ridges are spreading centres where two plates move apart from each other at a rate of several centimetres per year. Molten rock material wells up from the underlying mantle into the gap between the diverging plates and solidifies into oceanic crust, thereby creating new ocean floor. At the deep-sea trenches, two plates converge, with one plate sliding down under the other into the mantle where it is melted. Thus, for each segment of new ocean floor created at the ridges, an equal amount of old oceanic crust is destroyed at the trenches, or so-called subduction zones. It is for this reason that the oldest segment of ocean floor, found in the far western Pacific, is apparently only about 200 million years old, even though the age of Earth is estimated to be at least 4.6 billion years.

The dominant factors that govern seafloor relief and topography are the thermal properties of the oceanic plates, tensional forces in the plates, volcanic activity, and sedimentation. In brief, the oceanic ridges rise about 2 km (1.2 miles) above the seafloor because the plates near these spreading centres are warm and thermally expanded. In contrast, plates in the subduction zones are generally cooler. Tensional forces resulting in plate divergence at the spreading centres also create block-faulted mountains and abyssal hills, which trend parallel to the oceanic ridges. Seamounts and guyots, as well as abyssal hills and most aseismic ridges, are produced by volcanism. Continuing sedimentation throughout the ocean basin serves to blanket and bury many of the faulted mountains and abyssal hills with time. Erosion plays a relatively minor role in shaping the face of the deep seafloor, in contrast to the continents. This is because deep ocean currents are generally slow (they flow at less than 50 cm [20 inches] per second) and lack sufficient power.

Exploration of the ocean basins

Mapping the characteristics of the ocean basin has been difficult for several reasons. First, the oceans are not easy to travel over; second, until recent times navigation has been extremely crude, so that individual observations have been only loosely correlated with one another; and, finally, the oceans are opaque to light—that is, the deep seafloor cannot be seen from the ocean surface. Modern technology has given rise to customized research vessels, satellite and electronic navigation, and sophisticated acoustic instruments that mitigate some of these problems.

The Challenger Expedition, mounted by the British in 1872–76, provided the first systematic view of a few of the major features of the seafloor. Scientists aboard the HMS Challenger determined ocean depths by means of wire-line soundings and discovered the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Dredges brought up samples of rocks and sediments off the seafloor. The main advance in mapping, however, did not occur until sonar was developed in the early 20th century. This system for detecting the presence of objects underwater by acoustic echo provided marine researchers with a highly useful tool, since sound can be detected over several thousands of km in the ocean (visible light, by comparison, can penetrate only 100 metres [about 330 feet] or so of water).

Modern sonar systems include the Seabeam multibeam echo sounder and the GLORIA scanning sonar. They operate on the principle that the depth (or distance) of the seafloor can be determined by multiplying one-half the elapsed time between a downgoing acoustic pulse and its echo by the speed of sound in seawater (about 1,500 metres [4,900 feet] per second). Such multifrequency sonar systems permit the use of different pulse frequencies to meet different scientific objectives. Acoustic pulses of 12 kilohertz (kHz), for example, are normally employed to measure ocean depth, while lower frequencies—3.5 kHz to less than 100 hertz (Hz)—are used to map the thickness of sediments in the ocean basins. Very high frequencies of 100 kHz or more are employed in side-scanning sonar to measure the texture of the seafloor. The acoustic pulses are normally generated by piezoelectric transducers. For determining subbottom structure, low-frequency acoustic pulses are produced by explosives, compressed air, or water-jet implosion. Near-bottom sonar systems, such as the Deep Tow of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (in La Jolla, Calif., U.S.), produce even more detailed images of the seafloor and subbottom structure. The Deep Tow package contains both echo sounders and side-scanning sonars, along with associated geophysical instruments, and is towed behind a ship at slow speed 10 to 100 metres (33 to 330 feet) above the seafloor. It yields very precise measurements of even finer-scale features than are resolvable with Seabeam and other comparable systems.

Another notable instrument system is ANGUS, a deep-towed camera sled that can take thousands of high-resolution photographs of the seafloor during a single day. It has been successfully used in the detection of hydrothermal vents at spreading centres. Overlapping photographic images make it possible to construct photomosaic strips about 10 to 20 metres (33 to 66 feet) wide that reveal details on the order of centimetres.

Three major navigation systems are in use in modern marine geology. These include electromagnetic systems such as loran and Earth-orbiting satellites. Acoustic transponder arrays of two or more stations placed on the seafloor a few kilometres apart are used to navigate deeply towed instruments, submersibles, and occasionally surface research vessels when detailed mapping is conducted in small areas. These systems measure the distance between the instrument package and the transponder sites and, using simple geometry, compute fixes accurate to a few metres. Although the individual transponders can be used to determine positions relative to the array with great accuracy, the preciseness of the position of the array itself depends on which system is employed to locate it.

Earth-orbiting satellites such as Seasat and Geosat have uncovered some significant topographic features of the ocean basins. Seasat, launched in 1978, carried a radar altimeter into orbit. This device was used to measure the distance between the satellite path and the surfaces of the ocean and continents to 0.1 metre (0.3 foot). The measurements revealed that the shape of the ocean surface is warped by seafloor features: massive seamounts cause the surface to bulge over them because of gravitational attraction. Similarly, the ocean surface downwarps occur over deep-sea trenches. Using these satellite measurements of the ocean surface, William F. Haxby computed the gravity field there. The resulting gravity map provides comprehensive coverage of the ocean surface on a 5′-by-5′ grid that depicts five nautical miles on each side at the Equator). Coverage as complete as this is not available from echo soundings made from ships. Because the gravity field at the ocean surface is a highly sensitive indicator of marine topography, this map reveals various previously uncharted features, including seamounts, ridges, and fracture zones, while improving the detail on other known features. In addition, the gravity map shows a linear pattern of gravity anomalies that cut obliquely across the grain of the topography. These anomalies are most pronounced in the Pacific basin; they are apparently about 100 km (about 60 miles) across and some 1,000 km (about 600 miles) long. They have an amplitude of approximately 10 milligals (0.001 percent of the Earth’s gravity attraction) and are aligned west-northwest—very close to the direction in which the Pacific Plate moves over the mantle below.