Living on the Mid-Oceanic Ridge

When friends asked me where I am going for holiday, I said somewhere far far away from Geology – Iceland. Very funny!

Iceland is where one could actually see one of the evidence of the theory of Plate Tectonics – the mid-oceanic ridge. The theory of the Plate Tectonics incredibly only developed in the 60’s where it brings together older concept of ‘Continental Drift’ and a newer concept of ‘Sea Floor Spreading’ to describe the large scale motions of Earth’s lithosphere in the form of large plates. This was something I learnt when I reached university in the 80’s. But nowadays this subject is already thought when kids are in primary schools. Our daughter was already able to write an essay on plate tectonic when she was 7 years old when studying at JIS. So there goes how knowledge evolved very quickly in recent times.

Iceland is located in a Mid-Oceanic Ridge. The Mid-Oceanic Ridges are where two plates are pulling apart from each other as hot magma (liquid rock) emerges from the mantle as lava to fill the crack continuously created by the plate separation. The lava cools and in this case forms a land mass known as Iceland.
The Mid-Oceanic Ridge in Iceland resulted in Europe and America to be going apart from each other. The ‘spreading’ rate is actually very slow averaging 2.5 cm per year, or 25 km in a million years. But if the process continues for millions of years, this would result in plate movement of thousands of kilometres. Over the past 100 to 200 million years the Atlantic Ocean has grown from a tiny inlet of water between the continents of Europe, Africa, and the Americas into the vast ocean that exists today.