Honing in on the climate signal in seafloor topography

Abstract

The corrugated surface of the seafloor expresses the most areally extensive landform on Earth, known as “abyssal hills”, inherited from when the oceanic crust was created at a midocean ridge spreading center (1, 2) (Fig. 1). The main process is the shifting and rotation of adjacent blocks of crust relative to one another along fault zones predominantly during periods of low magmatic activity, interspersed between times of robust magmatism and the emplacement new crust (1, 3). In the presence of the steady far-field tug of plate tectonic forces, this interplay between faulting and magmatism depends on processes influencing the time dependence of magma generation, storage, and delivery to the surface (4, 5). In PNAS, Huybers et al. (6) argue that one such process originates with the fall and rise of sea level during glacial–interglacial climate cycles.