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transform fault
(redirected from transform faults)

   Also found in: Encyclopedia 0.03 sec.
trans·form fault (trnsfôrm)
n. Geology
A strike-slip fault, common in mid-ocean ridge regions, in which there has been a sudden change in the form or direction of displacement.

transform fault  (trnsfôrm)
A type of strike-slip fault that accommodates the relative horizontal slip between other tectonic elements, such as tectonic plates, and is common along the edges of plates in mid-ocean ridge regions. The lateral displacement along transform faults often ends or changes form abruptly. See Note at fault.


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The system, divided by fault lines called transform faults that lie perpendicular to the ridge, circles the planet like a seam on a baseball.
Forays to remote mid-ocean ridges The layer cake model began to crumble in the 1980s when scientists began dredging, drilling, and diving around the great transform faults that offset volcanic mid-ocean ridge segments in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
Previously, seismologists had thought that earthquakes along mid-ocean ridges either were associated exclusively with what they call normal faults, which feature a spreading apart of the ridge, or transform faults, structures similar to the San Andreas fault that produces "strike-slip" earthquakes whereby one side of the fault goes in one direction and the other in an opposite direction.
 
 
 
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