CompuServe Messages

Doug, >> >> 1. The ocean floors aside from the rises, seamounts, and continents are relatively smooth and show none of the bulging , cracking, waving, splitting, piling up, ect that would be evident if all the motions in the plates were taking place. << I need to study on that one. << Maybe I can save you a bit of time. I'm sitting here looking at a relief map of the ocean floors, almost certainly done from satellite radar scans combined with penetrating sonar scans. It shows that the vast majority of ocean floor consists of continental rises, slopes, shelves, plateaus, ridges, fracture zones, and submerged mountain ranges. "Abyssal plains" cover a very small fraction of the total ocean floor, certainly no more than 10% and probably around 5% or so. A lot of this relief is *only* visible from satellite scans or penetrating sonar scans. Over much of the sea, the features are buried beneath tens or hundreds of meters of accumulated sediments. Jon W.