Marie Tharp maps the sea floor
The rift she found was called girl talk — and proved continental drift
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The rift valley along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is where new sea floor is made, and it is the physical mechanism continental drift had lacked. Wegener had proposed that the continents move in 1912 and had been dismissed for forty years precisely because nobody could say how. The map Tharp drew with Bruce Heezen, published in 1977, is among the most reproduced scientific illustrations in existence. She was credited as co-author only from 1959.
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Marie Tharp was not allowed on the research ships because she was a woman, so she sat ashore and drew the sea floor from the depth soundings they sent in. In the middle of the Atlantic she found a deep rift running the whole length of the mountain range down there. Her colleague called it girl talk. She was right.
Sources
- Heezen & Tharp, World Ocean Floor Panorama (1977)
- Barton, Earth Sciences History 21 (2002) — Tharps rolle
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