Petrology of the ocean floor / Петрология океанского дна

“Ocean floor petrology” is concerned primarily with the study of volcanism and related processes involving the creation and the transformation of crustal material which takes place at contact with seawater. The field of ocean floor petrology has developed and will continue to evolve rapidly with man’s effort to penetrate and explore greater depths through the use of more sophisticated technology. The present work was initially intended to be a comprehensive review of the major mineralogical and geochemical investigations carried out in the study of oceanic crust. However, during the process of gathering the data together, new information has been added in order to further increment our knowledge of the oceanic crust.
It is not the pretense of this work to give a complete coverage of ocean-floor genesis, but to give insights into the compositional diversities of basement rock samples associated with various geological settings. Since the petrological studies of the ocean floor are interrelated with other disciplines, an attempt has been made throughout this work to cover some general aspects of the morphology and the structure of oceanic features for which data and samples are available. Both the sampling and the gathering of other geological data from the ocean floor have been found to be an expensive and difficult task. Submersibles and unmanned bottom-navigated instruments have demonstrated their efficiency and are prerequisites for sea-floor exploration in order to implement further detailed studies of magmatism, hydrothermalism and structural processes related to different types of geological features. <...>