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Oceanic ridges are found in every ocean basin and appear to girdle Earth. The ridges rise from depths near 5 km (3 miles) to an essentially uniform depth of about 2.6 km (1.6 miles) and are roughly symmetrical in cross section. They can be thousands of kilometres wide.
The oceanic ridge is an extensive underwater mountain range formed by the action of tectonic plates that are constantly altered and moved, and by the heat emitted from the Earth's core.
Definition. An oceanic ridge is a continuous mountain range that forms along the seafloor at divergent plate boundaries, where tectonic plates are moving apart and new oceanic crust is created.
Oceanic ridges are the topographic expression of linear or curvilinear zones along which the Earth's oceanic crust is created or modified. A glance at any detailed bathymetric chart reveals that many different geomorphic features within the oceans are called ridges.
The mid-ocean ridge system is the most extensive chain of mountains on Earth, stretching nearly 65,000 kilometers (40,390 miles) and with more than 90 percent of the mountain range lying underwater, in the deep ocean.
The oceanic ridge system is the largest feature of the Earth’s surface after the continents and the ocean basins themselves; it is explained by the theory of plate tectonics as a boundary between diverging plates where molten rock is brought up from deep beneath the Earth’s crust.
Ocean ridges host a range of habitats including hydrothermal vents, rocky slopes, and soft sediments, all with connections to the pelagic ecosystem above. Mid-ocean ridges stretch for tens of thousands of miles through the oceans, but other plate-boundary ridges can be quite short e.g., in back arc basins.
