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 oversaw 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 orientation of the fracture zones, and identified the volcanoes, earthquake zones, and sea mounts.
Marie’s discovery of the trench in the middle of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and her linkage of the major crustal plates for 40,000 miles around the Earth, showed us, and thus confirmed, the concept of plate tectonics and crustal movement.  For the “non-drifters” of the time, which included their boss Dr. Maurice Ewing, this was a somewhat revolutionary concept which eventually erupted in conflicts, suspensions, and academic rivalry within Columbia.  How Marie came to her place in history, what she was like and how she lived are the subjects of this paper.
Working with Marie for over nine years, as curator of her collection of cartographic materials housed at the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress and serving as co-executor of her estate, has provided me with an insight into her life that few biographers get to have.  She was fascinating to talk to, fun to joke with, and could go on for hours talking about her work.
In later life, following Heezen’s untimely death in 1977, she moved into the spotlight as a speaker, writer, and award receiver.  Columbia honored her with their first Heritage Award, the National Geographic Society with the Hubbard Medal, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute with their Women Pioneer in Oceanography award.