Marie Tharp, the geologist who mapped the seafloor

Mary Tharp She was born in 1920 in Ypsilanti, Michigan, United States. The only daughter of Bertha Louise Newton and William Edgar Tharp, her father’s work in the US Department of Agriculture’s Soil Bureau forced her to lead an itinerant childhood, during which this future geologist came into contact, though showing no early interest, with the scientific discipline that would characterize his later life.

Thus, in the wake of his father’s performance, whose work required winters to be spent in the southern United States and summers in the north that characterize the soft soil of the region, Tharp spent most of his early years assisting more than a dozen schools before completing it. School education in Florence, Alabama.

He entered Ohio University in 1939, flirting with various disciplines until, 6 months later, he discovered his passion for geology at the hands of his teacher, known as Dr. Dow, who suggested to Tharp that he develop the skill of drawing which would later be very useful to him in gaining a foothold in the field of geology; One of the many scientific disciplines reserved exclusively for men at that time.

During his senior year of college, responding to an advertisement on his college’s bulletin board, Tharp accepted an accelerated geology course focusing on the oil industry, where, due to men marching to the front lines during World War II, specialized workers were in great demand.

Marie Tharp and the Great Geological Controversy

Tharp was dealing with geology professionally and academically at a time of great controversy in the discipline. Barely 3 decades ago, the geologist Alfred Wegener He gave his theory about continental driftwhich has not yet been accepted by the scientific community, assume that the tectonic plates of the Earth’s crust move slowly over the Earth’s mantle.

The geologist, who is also already trained in the fields of physics, chemistry and mathematics, will start working for the company standard oil, in Tulsa, United States, before joining the newly established Laboratory of Geophysicist and Oceanographer in 1948 Maurice Ewingin which he would begin to do such works of arithmetic and drawing which very soon, by reason of laziness, would cause him to voluntarily resign his office.

However, Tharp’s proven value led Erwing to hire her again soon after, in 1952, this time with the promise of a more stimulating job with Bruce Hizenthe geologist with whom he would work for the next 25 years to co-produce his future discoveries.

And so Tharp and Heezen processed thousands of hitherto unexamined sound recordings from the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean. A map of the ocean floor at the time contains abundant information gaps, so to fill in the blanks, Tharp used temperature readings, salinity measurements, and other data. Determine the presence of a rift valley for the first time that occurred in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

The first reactions to his work were, as one might expect, hostile in the same way as they were to the theory proposed by Wegener, as well as irrefutable evidence that, 30 years earlier, he had been right about the motion of the continents and the nature of the earth’s crust. Very soon, however, both the scientific community and the general public will fall in love with the irrefutable evidence presented by Tharp and Heezen.

just a few years later, In 1957, the Geological Society of America published the first detailed physiographic chart of the ocean floor.. Other ocean diagrams followed in rapid succession, exposing the layers of the ocean on our planet and allowing scientists to develop interlocking hypotheses that have revolutionized the story we tell ourselves about Earth.

In 1960, the tectonic plate revolution reached its peak; Continental drift theory was accepted, and only a few years later, schoolchildren around the world learned that the continents fit perfectly into the surface of the ocean, something that also shook in line with observations made a few decades earlier, by Charles Darwin earlier. Science was experiencing one of its sweetest moments.

This is how continents separate and join