Marie Tharp’s Adventures in Mapping the Seafloor, In Her Own Words

Establishing the rift valley and the mid-ocean ridge that went all the way around the world for 40,000 miles…You can’t find anything bigger than that, at least on this planet.

Lots of cool science history in this first-person account, but also some less cool stuff. Marie Tharp saw early on what the sea floor was telling us, but was dismissed with casual sexism?

Almost everyone in the United States thought continental drift was impossible. Bruce initially dismissed my interpretation of the profiles as “girl talk.”

Check.

Ideas taken much more seriously when a man starts to advocate for them?

We made profiles of some of the valleys in East Africa and noted the topographical similarities between the valleys in the ocean and on land. Bruce also noticed that the shallow earthquakes associated with the East African Rift fell within the valley walls. He began to endorse the existence of a continuous central valley within the mid-oceanic ridge.

Doc began to get interested at this point. He’d heard of this “gully,” as we called it, and he would pop into our lab from time to time and ask, “How’s the gully coming?”

Check.

Vulnerable people becong collateral damage in a feud between two male egos?

Now our efforts were thwarted by a long-lasting falling-out between Bruce and Doc. There are two sides to that story, but the result was that Doc banned Bruce from Lamont ships and denied Bruce access to Lamont data. He tried unsuccessfully to fire Bruce, who had a tenured faculty position at Columbia, but he did fire me.

Check.

At least Marie Tharp did finally, justly, get the credit for her groundbreaking work. This piece is part of the celebrations of the centenary of her birth.