Assignment #49
December 14th, 2016
The oceanic crust produced by the Earth today is significantly thinner than crust made 170 million years ago, during the time of the supercontinent Pangea, according to University of Texas at Austin researchers.
The thinning is related to the cooling of Earth's interior prompted by the splitting of the supercontinent Pangaea, which broke up into the continents that we have today.
the mantle is the very hot, but mostly solid, layer of rock between the Earth's crust and core. Magma from the mantle forms oceanic crust when it rises from the mantle to the surface at spreading centers and cools into the rock that forms the very bottom of the seafloor. This study suggests that since the breakup of Pangea, the cooling rate of the mantle has increased from 6-11 degrees Celsius per 100 million years to 15-20 degrees per 100 million years. Since cooler mantle temperatures generally produce less magma, it's a trend that's making modern day ocean crust thinner.