Modes of faulting at mid-ocean ridges

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Abstract

Abyssal-hill-bounding faults that pervade the oceanic crust are the most common tectonic feature on the surface of the Earth. The recognition that these faults form at plate spreading centres came with the plate tectonic revolution. Recent observations reveal a large range of fault sizes and orientations; numerical models of plate separation, dyke intrusion and faulting require at least two distinct mechanisms of fault formation at ridges to explain these observations. Plate unbending with distance from the top of an axial high reproduces the observed dip directions and offsets of faults formed at fast-spreading centres. Conversely, plate stretching, with differing amounts of constant-rate magmatic dyke intrusion, can explain the great variety of fault offset seen at slow-spreading ridges. Very-large-offset normal faults only form when about half the plate separation at a ridge is accommodated by dyke intrusion.

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Multi-channel seismic imaging of a crustal magma chamber along the East Pacific Rise

J Mutter, J Orcutt, T. Brocher … (1987)

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An ultraslow-spreading class of ocean ridge.

Henry Dick, Jian Lin, Hans Schouten (2003)

New investigations of the Southwest Indian and Arctic ridges reveal an ultraslow-spreading class of ocean ridge that is characterized by intermittent volcanism and a lack of transform faults. We find that the mantle beneath such ridges is emplaced continuously to the seafloor over large regions. The differences between ultraslow- and slow-spreading ridges are as great as those between slow- and fast-spreading ridges. The ultraslow-spreading ridges usually form at full spreading rates less than about 12 mm yr(-1), though their characteristics are commonly found at rates up to approximately 20 mm yr(-1). The ultraslow-spreading ridges consist of linked magmatic and amagmatic accretionary ridge segments. The amagmatic segments are a previously unrecognized class of accretionary plate boundary structure and can assume any orientation, with angles relative to the spreading direction ranging from orthogonal to acute. These amagmatic segments sometimes coexist with magmatic ridge segments for millions of years to form stable plate boundaries, or may displace or be displaced by transforms and magmatic ridge segments as spreading rate, mantle thermal structure and ridge geometry change.