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Back from Below

December 2, 2013

During a June 2013 trip from Barbados to Woods Hole, scientists and engineers on board R/V Knorr took a close look at regions of the seafloor along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that present a new form of sea floor spreading. In it, instead of seafloor simply spreading appart, the lower crust and mantle are uplifted and spread away from the ridge axis onto one oceanic plate, while the shallow crust and seafloor lavas spread in the opposite direction through a process known as detachment faulting. The team collected high-resolution images of the seafloor, dredged up rock samples, and carried out photographic, geophysical, and hydrographic surveys using the autonomous underwater vehicle Sentry (pictured) and TowCam. Together, the data collected will help improve scientists’ understanding of how the seafloor has formed and changed over the past 5 million years. (Photo by Henry Dick, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)