image credit: IKONOS Satellite image courtesy of GeoEye; image source; larger image
The Island of Surtsey, Iceland
This is Surtsey, a volcanic island formed in 1963 off the southern coast of Iceland, which lies astride the the mid-Atlantic Ridge (the boundary of the North American and the Eurasian tectonic plates). To learn more about this image, see The Island of Surtsey, Iceland. To see how the plate boundary runs right through Iceland, go to the Smithsonian Institution's This Dynamic Planet, and zoom in on Iceland (it's in the upper right corner of the map).
(This feature was updated on July 20, 2013.)
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Seafloor Spreading Interactive Animations
Try UCAR's Seafloor Spreading Interactive Animations for a simulation of the magnetic stripes on the ocean bottom--you can spot them by moving a compass around on a map of the mid-Atlantic Ridge. For related geophysics simulations from Cornell, see the Plate Tectonics section of Discover Our Earth.