What is the mid Atlantic rise?
The face of our handsome planet is wrinkled with mountains and valleys, scarred with steep walled canyons and spotted with seething volcanoes. Most of our globe is covered with water, and the floors of the oceans also have their ups and downs, grooves and ridges. We measure the ups and downs of the continents from sea level, which is the average level of the ocean surface between high and low tides. The sandy floor of Death Valley lies 281 feet below sea level, and the snowy shoulders of Mt. Everest rise 29,000 feet above sea level. But the deepest grooves and the most massive mountains of the solid surface of the Earth are below sea level. They are the ups and downs on the bumpy floors of the worldwide oceans. The job of surveying the ocean floor began only a few years ago, and it is not yet completed. For a long time the experts had suspected that the floor of the Atlantic was far from smooth, but the discovery of the mid Atlantic rise came as a stupendous surprise. It was reasonable
