Abstract
Sea-floor topography in the Pacific is mainly aligned with original spreading directions1, but is overprinted by alignments created by mid-plate processes. Spreading produces abyssal hills and fracture zones, and mid-plate volcanism generates seamounts, isolated or in chains. A different category of topography, the 'Cross-grain', discovered in geoid-height data collected by the Seasat radar altimeter2, comprises linear troughs and swells spaced ∼200 km apart, oblique to fracture zones and abyssal hills but parallel to the Hawaiian chain. Three models have been proposed for the Cross-grain: small-scale convection, organized into longitudinal rolls by the shear of the Pacific Plate2; compressive buckling3; and lithospheric boudinage resulting from plate-wide tensile stresses4,5. None of the previously available data ruled out any of these models. Here we report multi-beam bathymetric data revealing long, narrow en-echelon ridges along the Cross-grain, interpreted as evidence of tension cracks in the Pacific plate.
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Winterer, E., Sandwell, D. Evidence from en-echelon cross-grain ridges for tensional cracks in the Pacific plate. Nature 329, 534–537 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1038/329534a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/329534a0
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