Vine and Matthews?

Question

What evidence did Vine and Matthews present that forced geologists to consider seafloor spreading as a fact?

what did they discover?

what principals are involved?

what is the significance of this discovery?

Answer 1

Here is a reliable site to answer your questions.

http://www.beyonddiscovery.org/content/v...

Answer 2

They discovered that the crust surrounding the midocean ridges showed alternating bands -- each band magnetized with a polarity opposite the surrounding bands.

They proposed that lava erupted at different times along the rift at the crest of the mid-ocean ridges preserved different magnetic anomalies.

Also, they proposed that lava erupted on the sea floor on both sides of the rift, solidified, and moved away before more lava was erupted. If the Earth's magnetic field had reversed (changed from one geographic pole to the other) between the two eruptions, the lava flows would preserve a set of parallel bands with different magnetic properties. The ability of Vine and Matthews' hypothesis to explain the observed pattern of ocean floor magnetic anomalies provided strong support for sea floor spreading.

One principle that is involved is that of multiple magnetic-pole inversions.

Answer 3

In brief:

They found out strip magnetic anomalies in the ocean floor and mapped the same. The importance of their find lies in the fact the rocks on either side of mid-oceanic ridge or axis has signature of fossilised  magnetic polarity when the new crust was being formed as periodic episode. It characteristically showed younger rocks adjacent to the axis and oldest rocks away. Any movement across the axis due to transform faults also displaced these strip anomalies which helped in measuring the lateral shift due to faulting etc.

Thus they discovered very convincing evidences of sea floor spreading which latter on helped Li-picheon et.al to formulate the axioms for Plate Tectonic Theory as we know it today.

thnks

Answer 4

A hypothesis was presented in 1963 by Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews to explain this pattern. They proposed that lava erupted at different times along the rift at the crest of the mid-ocean ridges preserved different magnetic anomalies.

Vine and Matthews proposed that lava erupted on the sea floor on both sides of the rift, solidified, and moved away before more lava was erupted.

The ability of Vine and Matthews' hypothesis to explain the observed pattern of ocean floor magnetic anomalies provided strong support for sea floor spreading