A team of geologists from Duke University and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has discovered a grinding, coordinated ballet of crustal "microplates" unfolding below the equatorial east Pacific Ocean within a construction zone for new seafloor.
The scientists deduced that relatively small sections of the ocean floor there, and perhaps in other similar places, may be slowly rotating like imperfectly meshing cogs in a machine. The unexpected findings provide new insights into the way several ocean ridge segments that border the microplates evolved into their current positions to form part of what is known as a "triple junction," according to the researchers. And these results may be applicable to systems elsewhere, they added. "As often happens in science, what you think youre going to learn doesnt always end up being the exciting thing that you learn," said Emily Klein, the Lee Hill Snowdon Professor at Dukes Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, who is the lead author of a report on the findings published in the Thursday, February 24, 2005 issue of the journal Nature.
Other authors include Deborah Smith, Clare Williams and Hans Schouten of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. The groups study, begun aboard the San Diego-based research ship R/V Melville, was supported by the National Science Foundation. Klein, whose specialty is geochemistry, said the scientists original focus was the chemistry and structure of the Incipient Rift, the smallest and newest of four ocean ridge segments in a region of the ocean floor northwest of the Galapagos Islands. Ocean ridges are linear features on the ocean floor where molten magma originating in the earths mantle rises and solidifies to form new ocean crust.
Monte Basgall | EurekAlert!
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Physicists of the University of Würzburg have made an astonishing discovery in a specific type of topological insulators. The effect is due to the structure of the materials used. The researchers have now published their work in the journal Science.
Topological insulators are currently the hot topic in physics according to the newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Only a few weeks ago, their importance was...
In recent years, lasers with ultrashort pulses (USP) down to the femtosecond range have become established on an industrial scale. They could advance some applications with the much-lauded “cold ablation” – if that meant they would then achieve more throughput. A new generation of process engineering that will address this issue in particular will be discussed at the “4th UKP Workshop – Ultrafast Laser Technology” in April 2017.
Even back in the 1990s, scientists were comparing materials processing with nanosecond, picosecond and femtosesecond pulses. The result was surprising:...
Have you ever wondered how you see the world? Vision is about photons of light, which are packets of energy, interacting with the atoms or molecules in what...
A multi-institutional research collaboration has created a novel approach for fabricating three-dimensional micro-optics through the shape-defined formation of porous silicon (PSi), with broad impacts in integrated optoelectronics, imaging, and photovoltaics.
Working with colleagues at Stanford and The Dow Chemical Company, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign fabricated 3-D birefringent...
In experiments with magnetic atoms conducted at extremely low temperatures, scientists have demonstrated a unique phase of matter: The atoms form a new type of quantum liquid or quantum droplet state. These so called quantum droplets may preserve their form in absence of external confinement because of quantum effects. The joint team of experimental physicists from Innsbruck and theoretical physicists from Hannover report on their findings in the journal Physical Review X.
“Our Quantum droplets are in the gas phase but they still drop like a rock,” explains experimental physicist Francesca Ferlaino when talking about the...
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