The Galapagos Spreading Centre: Lithospheric Cooling and Hydrothermal Circulation

The spatial pattern of cooling near a spreading ridge crest was investigated with a suite of 71 precisely-navigated heat-flow stations on the Galapagos spreading centre, East Pacific, near 86°W longitude. Stations are on crust less than 1.0 My old on which bathymetry and sediment distribution are well known. Values vary from near zero to greater than 30 HFU (10−6 cal cm−2 s−1). The average over the entire region is significantly less than that...