The world’s great oceans are known to most people. Less well known is the seabed, and the fact that sediments are continually being deposited there.
The recently updated map GlobSed shows 30 % more sediments on the seabed than previously assumed. A PhD Fellow at UiO has led the update.
As much as 70 % of the Earth's surface is covered by oceans. The seabed itself, which is part of the Earth's crust (lithosphere), has been extensively investigated over the past decades and even centuries, but is only recently coming into focus. The crust varies in thickness depending on where you measure, and is thickest at the continental shelves and thinnest at the so-called mid-ocean ridges where new seabed forms. But the sea also contains a lot of material that slowly accumulates on top of these rocks – on the seabed – and eventually becomes sedimentary rocks.
The sedimentary rocks are a product of biological marine processes and/or erosion on land. The continuously ongoing geological processes produce large quantities of loose particles that are transported and deposited on the seabed by winds and ocean currents, explains Eivind Straume, one of the researchers behind the update.
The thickness of deposits on the seabed has previously been mapped in 2003, 2013 and was due for an update. The last update, published earlier this year, was made by an international research team, where several researchers from the Department of Geosciences and the Norwegian Centre of Excellence Center CEED (The Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics) at UiO have participated. The update was led by Eivind Straume, PhD Fellow at CEED.
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Image via Eivind O. Straume, University of Oslo
