GoKawiilOn 26 April 2024, deep beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean, a sequence of earthquakes shook the sea floor. This was the start of a sea-floor spreading event, in which two tectonic plates moved apart by more than one metre. The event caused the sea floor to fall by several metres and the eruption of large volumes of magma. Plate separation is continually forming new sea floor, but it has never been observed in situ — until now. An experiment that had been deployed on the sea floor two months earlier captured the event, and is reported in Nature by Royer et al.1.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-01943-5
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Competing Interests The authors declare no competing interests.
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