The Sediment Layer On The Ocean Floor

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.

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. Sea floor sediment and the age of the earth. 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 ocean basin floor is everywhere covered by sediments of different types and origins.

Terrigenous pelagic and hydrogenous. Sediment thickness in the oceans averages about 450 metres 1 500 feet. 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. 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. Terrigenous sediment is derived from land and usually deposited on the continental shelf continental rise and abyssal plain. There is a vast difference between how uniformitarian scientists and creation scientists view earth history and the data sets from the past. It is further contoured by strong currents along the continental rise.

There are three kinds of sea floor sediment. Ocean floor sediments may be window on world s warmer future. This sediment is composed of clay particles and microskeletons of oceanic organisms that sink slowly through the water column to the ocean floor. The only exception are the crests of the spreading centres where new ocean floor has not existed long enough to accumulate a sediment cover.