Young crust at mid-ocean ridges
New oceanic crust forms at spreading ridges. The youngest mapped ages therefore tend to follow active ridge axes, including the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
BOUNDARIES
Loading the atlas...
Plate colours identify regions, not risk.
0Seafloor age: millions of years280+
Click ocean floor to read its age in the published model.
Older ocean floor toward margins
Crust generally grows older away from a ridge, but spreading changes, transform offsets and subduction complicate the pattern. Distance from the nearest coast is not a reliable age measure.
Read the age scale
An age grid describes when oceanic crust formed, usually in millions of years. It does not measure water depth or the age of sediment lying above the crust; blank areas can reflect the dataset mask.
Sources and map method
Plate outlines use Peter Bird's PB2002 model, distributed by Nordpil under the Open Data Commons Attribution licence. Coastlines and country outlines are Natural Earth public-domain data. Boundary detail is limited by the source model. Ocean-floor ages use Seton et al. (2020), dataset v1.1, CC BY 4.0. The display samples the source grid at 0.25-degree pixel centres; blank cells have no age value.
- Seton et al. (2020): Oceanic crustal age and spreading parameters
- EarthByte: 2020 seafloor age grids
- Map dataset sources and licences
- PB2002 geometry and licence
- Natural Earth terms
Country lookup compares simplified land outlines with the plate model. Boundaries and historical coastlines are modelled features. This atlas explains geography; it does not predict earthquakes or provide site-specific hazard estimates.