MAPRIDGES: Global Database of Mid-Oceanic Ridges Segments and Transform Faults

The precise location and geometry of oceanic spreading centers and associated transform faults or discontinuities' boundary has fundamental implications in our understanding of oceanic accretion, the accommodation of deformation around rigid lithospheric blocks, and the distribution of magmatic and volcanic processes. The now widely used location of mid oceanic ridges worldwide, published by P. Bird in 2003, can be updated based on recent publicly available and published ship-based multibeam swath bathymetry data (100-m resolution or better), now available to ~25% of the ocean seafloor, but covering a significant proportion of the mid-ocean ridge system (>70%). Here we publish the MAPRIDGES database built under the coordination of CGMW (Commission for the Geological Map of the World), with a first version V1.0 (06/2024) that provides high resolution and up-to-date datasets of mid-ocean ridge segments and associated transform faults, and follow-up updates that will also include non-transform offsets. The detailed mapping of individual mid oceanic ridge segments was conducted using GMRT (Ryan et al., 2009) (version 4.2 for MAPRIDGES V1.0), other publicly available datasets (e.g., NCEI, Pangaea, AWI), and existing literature. MAPRIDGES will be revised with the acquisition of additional datasets, new publications, and correction of any errors in the database. The MAPRIDGE database was built in a GIS environment, where each feature holds several attributes specific to the dataset. We include three different georeferenced shapefile layers: 1) Ridge Segments, 2) Transform Faults, and 3) Transform Zones. The latest corresponds to zones of distributed strike-slip deformation that lack a well-defined fault localizing strain, but that are often treated as transform faults. 1) The Ridge Segments Layer contains 1461 segments with 9 attributes: - AREA_LOCA: The Name of the Ridge System - LOC_SHORT: The short form of the Ridge System using 3 characters - LAT: The maximum latitude of the ridge segment - LONG: the maximum longitude of the ridge segment - LENGTH: the length of the ridge segment in meters - CONFIDENCE: the degree of confidence on digitization based on the availability of high-resolution bathymetry data: 1 = low to medium confidence, 2 = high confidence - REFERENCES: supporting references used for the digitization - NAME_CODE: unique segment code constructed from the LOC_SHORT and LAT attributes in degree, minute, second coordinate format - NAME_LIT: name of the segment from the literature if it exists 2) The Transform Fault Layer contains 260 segments with 4 attributes: - NAME_TF: Name of the transform fault according to the literature - LENGTH: length of the transform fault in meters - LAT: The maximum latitude of the fault segment - LONG: the maximum longitude of the fault segment 3) The Transform Zone layer contains 10 segments with 4 attributes: - NAME_TF: Name of the transform zone according to the literature - LENGTH: length of the transform fault in meters - LAT: The maximum latitude of the fault segment - LONG: the maximum longitude of the fault segment To facilitate revisions and updates of the database, relevant information, corrections, or data could be sent to B. Sautter (benjamin.sautter@univ-ubs.fr) and J. Escartín (escartin@geologie.ens.fr).