sea-floorn.

1855 C. Kingsley Glaucus 54 The variety of its rocks, aspects, and sea-floors.

1922 J. Joyce Ulysses ii. 368 On her stow he ere was living with dear wife and lovesome daughter that then over land and seafloor nine years had long outwandered.

1946 Proc. Prehistoric Soc. 12 24 The seal must have sunk in deep water and come to rest on the sea-floor.

1967 Oceanogr. & Marine Biol. 5 317 Two principal dispersal mechanisms affect shelf benthos; these are, (1) shallow seafloor connections and, (2) surface currents.

1981 London Mag. July 9 A door slams, a heavy wave, a door, the sea-floor shudders.

1961 R. S. Dietz in Nature 3 June 854/1 [The concept proposed here, which can be termed the ‘spreading sea~floor theory’, is largely intuitive, having been derived through an attempt to interpret sea-floor bathymetry.]

1961 R. S. Dietz in Nature 3 June 856/2 Sea floor spreading obviates this difficulty: continents never move through the sima.

1971 Nature 1 Jan. 9/2 The whole of geophysics has been transformed within a few years by the discovery of seafloor spreading.

1977 A. Hallam Planet Earth 42/3 If its magnetic signature allowed an age to be assigned to each piece of ocean floor, it was possible to calculate a velocity for sea-floor spreading.