[1][2] Current research indicates that complex convection within the Earth's mantle allows material to rise to the base of the lithosphere beneath each divergent plate boundary.
At divergent boundaries, two plates move away from each other and the space that this creates is filled with new crustal material sourced from molten magma that forms below.
If one views the seafloor between the fracture zones as conveyor belts carrying the ridge on each side of the rift away from the spreading center the action becomes clear.
Airborne geomagnetic surveys showed a strange pattern of symmetrical magnetic reversals on opposite sides of ridge centers.
Scientists had been studying polar reversals and the link was made by Lawrence W. Morley, Frederick John Vine and Drummond Hoyle Matthews in the Morley–Vine–Matthews hypothesis.