Kinematics and Animation of OSCs and Propagators

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The floor of the ocean is formed by the injection of magma into rifts or spreading centers along the mid-ocean ridges in a process that has been continually occurring for millions of years. In places the mid-ocean ridges are offset by transform faults. The geometry of spreading centers changes slowly with time through poorly understood processes of rift propagation. This proposal requests funds to extend recent work on the kinematics of propagating rifts to the more general case of nontransform offsets to try to obtain a description of ridge behavior. The PI's propose to expand a model of the nonsteady behavior of a failing rift tip by repeated jumps to incorporate possible nonsteady behavior by both rift tips in an overlapping geometry. present model cannot describe the offsets commonly known as overlapping spreading centers (OSC's) where both tips seem to jump.