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Marie Tharp maps the sea floor
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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