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Article: Exploring volcanoes, earthquakes, and mounting building under the Atlantic Ocean.
- Article from:
- Oceanus
- Article date:
- March 22, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Each year hundreds of thousands of earthquakes shake the ocean floor along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Only the largest of these quakes are detectable by seismic stations on land, but they are part of a continuous mountain building process along the 50,000-kilometer-long mid-ocean rift that circles the globe. In the past several years, my colleagues and I have been using a variety of acoustic sonars and marine geophysical sensors to explore underwater volcanoes and earthquakes, aiming at a better understanding of the submarine mountain building process that has shaped more than 70 percent of Earth's solid surface.
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