Scientists Discover Accurate Method to Date Oceanic Crust

The ocean floor is the ultimate recycling center. So the ocean floor rarely lasts longer than million years. But researchers in the Mediterranean Sea have found a chunk of ocean floor that may be million years old, dating back to the creation of the supercontinent Pangaea , reports Dave Mosher at Business Insider. These magnetic stripes are created as the ocean crust forms along mid ocean ridges. Granot and his team towed magnetic sensors to map 4, miles of the sea floor around the Herodotus and Levant Basins in the eastern Mediterranean basins between Turkey and Egypt.

He was so excited he had to walk up and down the plane till they landed.

The key to the scientists’ success was the confirmation of the presence of tiny crystals, called zircons, in oceanic crust. U-Pb dating of zircon is.

The basic granulite, which is considered to be the MORB based on geochemistry and isotopic characteristics , has been discovered recently as the enclaves in the Yingjiang islandarc magmatic suite on the border of Burma and west Yunnan, east of Myitkyina suture in the eastern Burma. The laser micro-area 40 Ar- 39 Ar technique is used to date the age of garnet and cliopyroxene that is the result of the early metamorphic event.

The discovery of the high-grade or high-pressure metamophic rocks in the island-arc magmatic suite by the way of studying its P-T-t paths can provide a good way to study the age and process of oceanic crust subduction, slab break-off, metamorphic terrain exhumation and the evolution of paleoocean basin. Download to read the full article text. Ji Jianqing, Zhong Dalai.

Ding Lin et al. Google Scholar. York, D.