Marie Tharp: The lady who showed us the ocean floors

Marie Tharp and Bruce Heezen of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University are best known for creating the first maps of the ocean floors. Bruce sailed the oceans collecting the data and overseeing the projects, but the person who turned the precision depth recordings and other geoscience data into the two-dimensional views of the bottoms was Marie. Meticulously, she sketched the features that comprise the ocean floors, aligned the data according to the orientations of the fracture zones, and identified volcanoes, earthquake epicenters, faults and sea mounts. Marie’s discovery of a deep valley centered along the axis of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and her linkage of the major crustal plates for over 64,000 km (40,000 miles) around the Earth, showed us, and thus confirmed, the concept of plate tectonics and crustal movement. How Marie came to her place in history, what she was like, and how her life unfolded are the subjects of this paper.