What was hesss theory

This was to come just a year after his publication Next pioneer. The Geological Society Plate Tectonics. Pioneers of plate tectonics What is a plate? Harry Hess died of a heart attack on August 26, in Massachusetts. Hess' most significant contribution to the plate tectonic theory began in when he was the commander of the U. Cape Johnson. While traveling from one destination to another, Hess would leave the sounding equipment on that would take measurements of the sea floor. It was at this time that Dr.

Hess discovered features on the floor of the ocean that appeared to be mountains with the tops flattened. He called these features guyouts after the first Geology professor at Princeton. History of Ocean Basins was published in and explained the mechanism behind Alfred Wegener's continental drift theory. In the paper Hess described how hot magma would rise from under the crust at the Great Global Rift. When the magma cooled, it would expand and push the tectonic plates apart.

This theory addressed many unanswered questions in the field of geology. One such question was why no marine fossils found in the ocean were more than million years old, but older marine fossils could be found on land. Another question that seemed to be explained my Hess' theory was why there was so little sediment deposited on the ocean floor, even though the ocean was 4 billion years old.

Hess explained that new crust was created at the Great Global Rift and was pushed under the continental crust about million years later where it would melt and turn into magma. This motion also explained the formation of the guyots that were found at the bottom of the ocean.

Hess theorized that these were once volcanic mountains that were moved and eroded over time. A guyot begins as a volcano on the ocean floor. As the oceanic plate moves the volcano moves as well. With the discovery of plate tectonics and the mapping of the earth into about 12 plates, plus the understanding that plates' movement caused earthquakes, Alfred Wegener 's idea of "continental drift" looked less ludicrous than his contemporaries had thought.

There still seemed to be no way that continents could plow through the earth's surface on their own, but perhaps something else could explain how the land masses had once been joined. Part of his mission had been to study the deepest parts of the ocean floor. In he had discovered that hundreds of flat-topped mountains, perhaps sunken islands, shape the Pacific floor. The discovery of the Great Global Rift in the s inspired him to look back at his data from years before.