Discover the world's oldest oceanic crust

The oldest oceanic crust on Earth is located in the eastern Mediterranean with an age of about 340 million years.

According to Science Daily, Roi Granot, Ph.D. at the Department of Environmental Geology at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev (BGU), Israel, identifies the eastern Mediterranean Sea with the world's oldest oceanic crust. The results are published in the journal Nature Geoscience on August 15.

Many basic tectonic features in the eastern Mediterranean so far remain a mystery because the sediments here are quite thick (10 - 15 km) and lack of magnetic anomalies. The team used sensors to survey the 7,000-kilometer marine area across the basin of Herodotus ocean and the Levant , east of the Mediterranean. They want to understand the nature and age of the Earth's crust beneath it.

The world's oldest oceanic crust in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.(Photo: Jason Thomson).

The data show that the rocks in Herodotus basin are characterized by "magnetic streaks". This is a sign that the oceanic crust forms in the middle of the ocean. When the magma at the middle of the ocean cools, the magnetization and orientation of the minerals in the rock are driven by the Earth's magnetic field.

"Time-varying magnetic orientation changes are recorded at the ocean floor, providing insight into the formation of Earth's crust, shedding light on stratigraphic structure and geodynamic processes in Granot said.

By determining the deviation of magnetic tracks, Granot indicated that the Herodotus basin in the ocean basin is about 340 million years old. The common oceanic crust returns to the Earth's mantle relatively quickly in submerged zones due to its high density. Therefore, most of the oceanic crust is less than 200 million years old.

"With the new geophysical data, we made great strides in understanding the geology of the study area , " Granot said.

According to Granot, Herodotus' oceanic crust is likely to be the remains of the ancient Tethys ocean between the two supercontinent Gondwana and Laurasia in the Mesozoic, before forming the Atlantic and India. Ocean.