Oceanic plates are continually manufactured at mid-ocean spreading ridges.  But exactly what processes go on at these ridges?  It turns out that it depends on what type of ridge it is—fast-spreading or slow-spreading.  And that our traditional view of vanishingly thin plate thickness at ridge axes is inaccurate.  Mathilde Cannat describes our modern understanding of mid-ocean ridges and the observations that led us there.

Mathilde Cannat is a research director at the Institut de Physique du Globe of Paris. Her research on mid-ocean ridges has fundamentally changed our understanding of the geological processes that create new oceanic crust at these ridges.

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