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The history of seamounts that reach the sea surface
File Name winterer.pps
Data Type presentation
Computer Program Microsoft Powerpoint 2003
File Size 53.76 MB - 1 file
Expert Level College and Introduction to Science
Contributor Jerry Winterer
Source No source
Resource Matrix The Formation of Seamounts
Description
Only a tiny proportion (a few percent) of seamounts attain heights that bring their summits above sealevel where a post-volcanic history more complicated than mere subsidence can develop. Nearly all of these island volcanoes erupt on lithosphere older than 5 m.y. and most develop on crust at least several tens of m.y. old. In this keynote presentation for the First SBN Workshop Jerry Winterer reviews the history of seamounts and how they come to forming reefs, crags, barriers, atolls and guyots. Repeated fluctuations of sealevel, particularly those of the magnitude a frequency of those in the Pleistocene, result in the formation of an atoll through rainwater dissolution, rather than the classical Darwin model of atoll formation. Few pre-Neogene atolls are known, possible because sealevel fluctuations were of insufficient amplitude (100 m) and duration (100 ky) to permit the necessary rainwater dissolution.
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