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Sonar image of Atlantis Massif dome, made of peridotite.

Sonar image of Atlantis Massif dome, made of peridotite.
Sonar image of Atlantis Massif dome, made of peridotite.
Sonar image of Atlantis Massif dome, made of peridotite.
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510765
University of Washington
Sonar image of Atlantis Massif dome, made of peridotite.
Still Image
01/01/2008
AtlantisMassif_viewN_C.jpg
Date is approximate.
Caption from Oceanus magazine, Vol. 46, No. 2, Pg. 7:
Old rock woven into new seafloor crust A quirky seafloor feature, once considered rare, may be a rather common occurrence that plays a key role in shaping Earth’s surface. Scientists had found an intriguing dome on the seafloor, called the Atlantis Massif (shown here), made of peridotite, a rock usually found deep in Earth’s mantle layer. It lay near a large “detachment” fault slanting deep into the upper mantle. The researchers now theorize that over hundreds of thousands of years, as Earth’s tectonic plates pulled apart, a mammoth block of mantle rock was pulled up along the fault toward the surface and eventually rolled over on the seafloor. The exhumed dome of old mantle rock, called a core complex, was effectively woven into the fabric of “new” ocean crust. Once they knew to look for core complexes, the scientists subsequently found them in many places on the seafloor. The discovery has sparked widespread attention since it was first reported July 26, 2006, in Nature by geophysicist Deborah Smith of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Johnson Cann of the University of Leeds (UK), and Javier Escartín of the National Center for Scientific Research (France).
University of Washington Center for Environmental Visualization, for the Lost City Program
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