01/05/2025
Marie Tharp, another scientific trailblazer who overcame multiple barriers on account of her s*x, to become a cartographer who discovered the 10,000 mile long Mid-Atlantic Ridge. (For which a man claimed credit.) Her work "caused a paradigm shift in earth science that led to the acceptance of the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift." Her male superior didn't believe her discovery, dismissing it in s*xit terms. But later, he claimed credit for her work, and left her name off on the maps she created in the 50s / early 60s when he published them.
Tharp's first degree was in geology, which was heavily prejudiced against women. "With classrooms empty of men during the war years, Michigan—which had never allowed women into its geology program—was trying to fill seats," though less than 4% of all earth sciences doctorates at the time were obtained by women. After graduating, Tharp began work as a junior geologist at the Stanolind Oil company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but discovered that the company did not permit women to do nor attend fieldwork. The company only permitted Tharp to coordinate maps and data for male colleagues' trips...
"She eventually found drafting work with Maurice Ewing, the founder of the Lamont Geological Observatory. Curiously, when interviewed for the job, Tharp did not mention she had a master's degree in geology. [Obviously it was a key qualification, so I can only conclude she judged it risky for a woman to claim it, because of men's threatened reaction.] Tharp was one of the first women to work at the Lamont Geological Observatory." [See? she knew very well the terrrain she was on.]
Eventually Tharp began to work with Bruce Heezen, plotting the ocean floor. "For the first 18 years of their collaboration, Heezen collected bathymetric data aboard the research ship Vema, while Tharp drew maps from that data *since women were barred from working on ships at the time.* (1964!!!) She was later able to join a 1968 data-collection expedition on the USNS Kane. She independently used data collected from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's research ship Atlantis, and seismographic data from undersea earthquakes. Her work with Heezen represented the first systematic attempt to map the entire ocean floor.
"As early as the mid-19th century, a submarine mountain range in the Atlantic had been roughly outlined by John Murray and Johan Hjort. Marie Tharp also discovered the rift valley on her more precise graphical representations of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which were based on new measurement data obtained with the echo sounder. **It took her a year to convince Bruce Heezen of this.** Later, she also mapped the other mid-ocean ridges...
"In 1952, Tharp painstakingly aligned sounding profiles from [the ship] Atlantis, acquired during 1946–1952, and one profile from the naval ship Stewart acquired in 1921. She created approximately six profiles stretching west to east across the North Atlantic. From these profiles, she examined the bathymetry of the northern sections of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Tharp identified an aligned, v-shaped structure running continuously through the axis of the ridge and believed that it might be a rift valley formed by the oceanic surface being pulled apart.
"Heezen was initially unconvinced as the idea would have supported continental drift, then a controversial theory. Many scientists, including Heezen, believed that continental drift was impossible at the time. Instead, for a time, he favored the Expanding Earth hypothesis, (now infamously) dismissing her explanation as "girl talk"."
Howard Foster's work plotting of earthquake epicenters in the oceans gave another angle on the underground geology of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. "When Foster's map of earthquake epicenters was overlaid with Tharp's profile of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, it became clear that the location of these earthquakes aligned with Tharp's rift valley. After putting together these two datasets, Tharp became convinced that a rift valley existed within the crest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It was only after seeing that **the location of earthquake epicenters aligned with Tharp's rift valley that Heezen accepted her hypothesis** and turned to the alternative theories of plate tectonics and continental drift...
"Tharp's name did not appear on any of the major papers on plate tectonics that Heezen and others published between 1959 and 1963. Tharp continued working with graduate student assistants to further map the extent of the central rift valley. Tharp demonstrated that the rift valley extended along with the Mid-Atlantic Ridge into the South Atlantic, and found a similar valley structure in the Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea, Red Sea, and Gulf of Aden, suggesting the presence of a global oceanic rift zone. Subsequently, in collaboration with the Austrian landscape painter Heinrich Berann, Tharp and Heezen realized their map of the entire ocean floor, which was published in 1977 by National Geographic under the title of The World Ocean Floor.
"Although Tharp was later recognized and credited for her work on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, it was Heezen who, at the time in 1956, put out and received credit for the discovery that was made." The discovery that SHE made, the passive voice functions as a cloak here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Tharp
