#Who mapped out the ocean floor in 1952 series

Almost all of Tharp’s colleagues, and practically every other scientist in the country, dismissed it you could get fired for believing in it, she later recalled. In the 1950s, as Tharp looked down at that tell-tale valley, Wegener’s theory was still considered verboten in the scientific community-even discussing it was tantamount to heresy. “The dream of a great poet,” opined the director of the Geological Survey of France: “One tries to embrace it, and finds that he has in his arms a little vapor or smoke.” Later, the president of the American Philosophical Society deemed it “utter, damned rot!” No force on Earth was thought powerful enough to move continents. In 1926, at a gathering of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, the scientists in attendance rejected Wegener’s theory and mocked its maker. If her calculations were right, the geosciences would never be the same.Ī few decades before, a German geologist named Alfred Wegener had put forward the radical theory that the continents of the earth had once been connected and had drifted apart. As she did, she became more convinced that the impossible was true: She was looking at evidence of a rift valley, a place where magma emerged from inside the earth, forming new crust and thrusting the land apart. She crunched and re-crunched the numbers for weeks on end, double- and triple-checking her data. Repeating in each was “a deep notch near the crest of the ridge,” a V-shaped gap that seemed to run the entire length of the mountain range. Her maps also showed something else-something no one expected. That range had been a shock when it was discovered in the 1870s by an expedition testing routes for transatlantic telegraph cables, and it had remained the subject of speculation since Tharp’s charting revealed its length and detail. Her drawings showed-for the first time-exactly where the continental shelf began to rise out of the abyssal plain and where a large mountain range jutted from the ocean floor.

#Who mapped out the ocean floor in 1952 series

Tharp spent weeks creating a series of six parallel profiles of the Atlantic floor stretching from east to west. As she charted the measurements by hand on sheets of white linen, the floor of the ocean slowly took shape before her.

Instead, she stayed in the lab, meticulously checking and plotting the ships’ raw findings, a mass of data so large it was printed on a 5,000-foot scroll. Women weren’t allowed on these research trips-the lab director considered them bad luck at sea-so Tharp wasn’t on board. For five years, Tharp’s colleagues at Columbia University had been crisscrossing the Atlantic, recording its depths. For the first time, ships could “sound out” the precise depths of the ocean below them. But the advent of sonar had changed everything.

Nearby, spread across several additional tables, lay her project-the largest and most detailed map ever produced of a part of the world no one had ever seen.įor centuries, scientists had believed that the ocean floor was basically flat and featureless-it was too far beyond reach to know otherwise. Marie Tharp spent the fall of 1952 hunched over a drafting table, surrounded by charts, graphs, and jars of India ink.