The following is from the October, 1967 National Geographic article by Samuel W. Matthews entitled "Science Explores the Monsoon Sea.

Another upheaval from earth's interior, incredibly larger, splits the entire Indian Ocean basin; it constitutes the single most significant feature charted by the IIOE.

This is part of the world-wide Mid-Oceanic Ridge, an enormous range of undersea mountains and valleys running down the middle of this ocean basin, as it does in the Atlantic and parts of the Pacific. Up to 1,500 miles wide, towering 10,000 feet and more, yet with its peaks still covered by 3,000 to 6,000 feet of water, the Mid-Oceanic Ridge is now regarded as the longest continuous feature of the earth's solid face.

In the Indian Ocean the ridge forms an upside-down Y (opposite and supplement painting). One arm curves out of the Atlantic around the foot of Africa, the other comes in from the Pacific, south around Australia. They meet east of Mauritius, near its outlying island dependency of Rodrigues, and together go north and then northwest across the Arabian Sea as the Carlsberg Ridge.

When the expedition began, the existence of the ridge in the Indian Ocean was known, but not its extent. Depth soundings during a multitude of crossings soon began to fill in blank spots and chart its shape.

In the early 1950's a dramatic discovery had been made, chiefly by Miss Tharp and Dr. Heezen of Laront, while mapping the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. They found that along its crestline runs a deep cleft, or rift valley. Now this rift showed up in the Indian Ocean, too; the Lamont research vessel Vema very early found the rift on crossings south and east of Madagascar. Other ships confirmed its existence wherever the great ridge was plumbed.

The oceanic rift follows with remarkable exactness a path that geologists earlier marked out by plotting the epicenter of ocean-bottom earthquakes around the world. Thus it is believed - and most earth scientists now agree - that the mid-oceanic rift forms a continuous world-wide system of crustal fractures, a fault or crack in earth's rocky skin that meanders on for nearly 40,000 miles.

All along this crack earth-shaking forces are at work. Here on the thin sea bottom, geophysicists say, earth's crust is being pulled apart and new rock added, welling up in molten form from the underlying mantle of the planet. And from the crack, constantly breaking and filling anew, the ocean floors are now known to be moving outward as fast as two to three inches a year.

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