Abyssal plains are flat areas of the ocean floor in a water depth between 3,500 and 5,000 with a gradient well below 0.1°. They occupy around 28 % of the global seafloor. The thickness of the sediment cover seldom exceeds 1,000 m, and the sediments consist of fine-grained erosional detritus and biogenic particles. The first global map of seafloor physiography, published by Heezen and Tharp in 1977, illustrated that the bottom of the ocean is bordered by continental margins of variable width and hosts large submarine mountain chains, the mid-ocean ridges. It also illustrated that between the continental margins and mid-ocean ridges, there exist vast flat and almost featureless regions, the so-called abyssal plains (Figure 1). The global seafloor map has been refined in recent years (e.g., by Smith and Sandwell, 1995; Becker et al., 2009), in a way that has allowed to perform quantitative analyses of the global distribution of specific seafloor features (Harris et al., 2014).
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Voelker, D. (2016). Abyssal Plains. In: Harff, J., Meschede, M., Petersen, S., Thiede, J. (eds) Encyclopedia of Marine Geosciences. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6238-1_211
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