. Collected reprints / Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratories [and] Pacific Oceanographic Laboratories. Oceanography ICELAND, a bleak, windswept island in the far North Atlantic, touching on the Arctic Circle, lies on rock hotter than lands at the equator. It is not entirely a foolish joke to say that an inhabitant of this island who runs short of hot water in his bathroom has only to drive a pipe down through the floor toget plenty for his hot bath. But the interest of geologists runs deeper and concerns more funda- mental aspects of the earth's history than hot
. Collected reprints / Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratories [and] Pacific Oceanographic Laboratories. Oceanography ICELAND, a bleak, windswept island in the far North Atlantic, touching on the Arctic Circle, lies on rock hotter than lands at the equator. It is not entirely a foolish joke to say that an inhabitant of this island who runs short of hot water in his bathroom has only to drive a pipe down through the floor toget plenty for his hot bath. But the interest of geologists runs deeper and concerns more funda- mental aspects of the earth's history than hot water. A Grand Scheme Only at Iceland does the kilometer-Iong mid-ocean ridge, a rift marking the pulling apart of the earth's crustal plates, breach the sur- face of the ocean. This island is. there- kilometers - ?7'I00 miles LOOKING north along Iceland's central nft. one can see where the earth's crust is slowly being pulled apart. To the left of the rift, the western Atlantic Ocean and North America to as far as the San Andreas Fault in California are drifting west at a rate of I centimeter each year. To the right of the rift, the eastern Allan- tic Ocean and all of Tunisia are drifting eastward to as far as the Pacific trenches off Kamchatka and Japan. In Iceland, the rifting is strongh overprinted h\ com- panion effects — the formation of vol- canoes and the effusion of lava above a vast ascending plume of magma, rising from deep within the earth's mantle. 10 fore, crucial to the revolutionary new concept of plate tectonics, or struc- tural geology of the earth's crust. {Also see "A Magnificent Revolu- ; Sea Frontiers. Vol. 18. No. 6, November-December. 1972.) According to plate tectonics, the earth's crust is a mosaic of about eight 100-kilometer-thick rigid plates, or shells, which slowly drifts over a 100 kilometers = 62 miles. 268. Please note that these images are extracted from scanned page images that may have been digitally enhanced
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