Marie Thorp

Accomplishments and Influences

• Marie Tharp single-handedly translated indecipherable columns of numbers recorded from 1940s-era ocean research expeditions into detailed, hand-drawn maps of the world’s oceans.
• She discovered the Earth’s ‘backbone’ even though men wouldn’t let her on a ship for the first 17 years of her career.

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• in partnership with her colleague Bruce Heezen, Tharp was the first to scientifically map the ocean floor.

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• She was considered both a scientist and an artist.
• In 1999, Marie received the Women Pioneer in Oceanography Award, awarded by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

WORLD OCEAN FLOOR PANORAMA, 1977

Tharp began her work in science as a geologist for Stanolind Oil in the 1940s. Once there she discovered much to her dismay that females were not permitted to conduct field work and she was resigned to office work. After completing a degree in mathematics, Tharp began working for the Lamont Geological Laboratory in 1948 at Columbia University in New York.

it was there that she met Bruce Heezen, also a geologist, and the two began working on a project to locate downed aircraft from World War II using photographic data. However, the majority of Tharp and Heezen’s work was a research project to map the topography of the ocean floor.

marie tharp

Tharp and Heezen wanted to map the ocean floor in order to understand its geology and hypothetically connect it to the continents. In order to this, They collaborated for many decades, from the 1950s into the 1970s, gathering information.

Because she was a woman, tharp was not allowed on ocean vessels. Tharp used the data collected by Heezen to systematically map the ocean floor.

Working with only pens, ink, and rulers, Tharp took those thousands of sonar readings and literally drew the underwater details of the ocean floor, longitude degree by latitude degree. Tharp used what is known as the physiographic mapping technique, using light and texture for her diagrams instead of color. Tharp also integrated research data from other sources such as the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and data from seismographs of underwater earthquakes.

world ocean floor panorama

as a woman, tharp faced many setbacks:

• she earned a master’s in petroleum geology from the University of Michigan, an opportunity which was only made available to women after college-aged men were sent overseas to fight in World War II.
• Tharp’s mentors saw that she was a capable scientist, but also urged her to learn drafting, a necessary skill for female researchers at the time. In the earth sciences, this meant turning rows and rows of numbers (collected by male scientists, of course) into hand-drawn maps.
• Up until the 1960s, it was considered bad luck for women to be on naval ships. So while Bruce Heezen, her future collaborator, was given a prestigious position as chief scientist for a series of National Geographic-funded scientific explorations of the ocean floor as a college senior, Tharp was stuck in a cramped basement office in New York City crunching numbers and processing the raw data collected by male scientists.
• In 1953, she made the stunning discovery of a 10,000-mile ridge in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. But Heezen, four years her junior and still a doctoral student, disagreed and ignored the idea that the rift was evidence for continental drift as just “girl talk.”
• Like most female scientists of the era, she wasn’t recognized for her work until very late in her life.

In an era where female scientists were routinely dismissed as secretaries and human calculators, Marie Tharp’s sharp mind and quiet determination allowed her to make huge waves. Her maps have shaped the way that we think about the Earth and offered support for the major theory of continental drift.

Marie Tharp is greatly recognized as a pioneer in a field dominated by men. Although more thorough maps of the ocean floor exist today, the impact of Tharp and her mapping of the ocean floor is still with us. She spent most of her career working in the background. Today, we openly recognize her contribution to oceanic exploration. Tharp, in partnership with Heezen, helped prove the theories of continental drift. But the most notable thing is that she helped map and illuminate a once unknown world – the ocean floor.

They have doubtlessly also inspired generations of budding female earth scientists, driving them forth to explore every corner of the globe.

Marie Tharp

Sources

• Freund, Cassie. “Four Facts about Marie Tharp, the Woman Whose Art Mapped the Bottom of the Sea.” Massive, 1 Feb. 2018, massivesci.com/articles/marie-tharp-bottom-ocean-maps/.
• Columbia News ::: Marie Tharp, Pioneering Mapmaker of the Ocean Floor, Dies. (2006, August 24). Retrieved June 22, 2018, from http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/06/08/tharp.html

sources cont.

• Marie Tharp. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth520/node/1797
• Maxwell, R. (2017, June 24). Marie Tharp and Mapping the Ocean Floor ~ GIS Lounge. Retrieved June 22, 2018, from https://www.gislounge.com/marie-tharp-and-mapping-ocean-floor/

sources cont.

• The Ages of Exploration. (n.d.). Retrieved June 22, 2018, from http://exploration.marinersmuseum.org/subject/marie-tharp/