Marie Tharp, Seafloor Mapping Pioneer, 1928-2006

Groundbreaking worked paved the way for modern view of seafloor; plate tectonics

Marie Tharp, an oceanic cartographer whose maps of the seafloor paved the way for the modern view of the ocean’s bed thus paving the way for wide acceptance of the theories of plate tectonics and contiental drift, died of cancer on 23 August 2006, the Los Angeles Times has reported. Tharp was 88 years old.

During a period comprising the late 1940s thorough at least the mid-1970s, Tharp (and her cohort, Bruce Heezen) collected and compiled the data that would evenutally reveal the existence of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge in the Atlantic Ocean, a discovery predicted in the then-new concept of contenental drift. Ironically, for the first 18 years of her work at Columbia University, she remained behind while her colleague collected and retrieved information; it was at the time traditional for women not to go on research cruises. She didn’t go on her first cruise until 1965.

The discovery of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge led to other discoveries which reinforced and brought to general accepance the new conventionally-accepted school of thought we today call “plate tectonics”.