The Sediment Layer On The Ocean Floor

Sea floor sediment and the age of the earth.

The sediment layer on the ocean floor.

Sea floor sediments and sedimentary rocks can range in thickness from a few millimetres to several tens of kilometres. Sediment thickness in the oceans averages about 450 metres 1 500 feet. Reviewed by michael j. There is a vast difference between how uniformitarian scientists and creation scientists view earth history and the data sets from the past.

The ocean basin floor is everywhere covered by sediments of different types and origins. There are three kinds of sea floor sediment. Ocean floor sediments sediment on the seafloor originates from a variety of sources. Terrigenous pelagic and hydrogenous.

Thus by examining the amount of dust as well as its grain size in the different layers of a sediment core oceanographers learn how arid the land surface was at a given time as well as how fast the average wind speeds were. The only exception are the crests of the spreading centres where new ocean floor has not existed long enough to accumulate a sediment cover. The sediment cover in the pacific basin ranges from 300 to 600 metres. Near the surface the sea floor sediments remain unconsolidated but at depths of hundreds to thousands of metres depending on the type of sediment and other factors the sediment becomes lithified.

Analysis of seafloor sediment reveals lower oxygen levels in the ocean when the planet heated up 55 9 million years ago. Russel humphreys a physicist at the institute for creation research believes that subduction removes only one billion tons of sediment from the seafloor every year so if the oceans are billions of years old there should be much more sediment present on the ocean floor than the current thickness which averages around 400 meters. It is further contoured by strong currents along the continental rise. Some may call this sediment biogenous sediment and this sediment roughly covered 75 of deep seafloor and one of the most important constituents of ocean sediments.