What Covers The Ocean Floor

The rocks of earth s crust are made up of.

What covers the ocean floor.

Biogenous sediments cover the greatest area on the seafloor. The biosphere reaches from the floor of the ocean to the tops of the highest mountains. Central intelligence agency cia project to recover the sunken soviet submarine k 129 from the pacific ocean floor in 1974 using the purpose built ship hughes glomar explorer. Project azorian erroneously called jennifer by the press after its top secret security compartment was a u s.

Biogenous sediments are most abundant. The pacific atlantic indian and arctic oceans. Bathymetry the shape of the ocean floor is largely a result of a process called plate tectonics the outer rocky layer of the earth includes about a dozen large sections called tectonic plates that are arranged like a spherical jig saw puzzle floating on top of the earth s hot flowing mantle. On average oceanic crust is only 6 to 7km thick compared to 35 to 40km for con tinental crust.

The largest terrigenous deposits are found near continental margins. The boundaries between these regions have evolved over time for a variety of historical cultural geographical and scientific reasons. The sediment type which covers the least volume on the ocean floor is cosmogenous. Their total volume on the seafloor is.

While there is only one global ocean the vast body of water that covers 71 percent of the earth is geographically divided into distinct named regions. Calcareous and siliceous oozes are. Benthos is the community of organisms which live on in or near the seabed the area known as the benthic zone. Terrigenous sediments are the most abundant.

All together the biosphere is a layer blanketing the earth about 20km 12 4m thick. This community lives in or near marine sedimentary environments from tidal pools along the foreshore out to the continental shelf and then down to the abyssal depths the benthic zone is the ecological region on in and immediately above the seabed including the sediment surface. The ocean is a huge body of saltwater that covers about 71 percent of the earth s surface. In recent years some oceanographers have determined that the seas around antarctica deserve their own designation.

The ocean basins are characterized not only by lying in deep water the ocean floor averages about 4km below sea level but also by being underlain by a thin layer of crust. The 1968 sinking of k 129 occurred approximately 1 600 miles 2 600 km northwest of hawaii. What type of sediment covers the least amount of the ocean floor.