26 Facts About Marie Tharp

Marie Tharp was an American geologist and oceanographic cartographer.

Marie Tharp's cartography revealed a more detailed topography and multi-dimensional geographical landscape of the ocean bottom.

Marie Tharp was born on July 30,1920, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, the only child of Bertha Louise Tharp, a German and Latin teacher, and William Edgar Tharp, a soil surveyor for the United States Department of Agriculture.

Marie Tharp often accompanied her father on his fieldwork, which gave her an early introduction to mapmaking.

At that point, Marie Tharp had attended over 17 public schools in Alabama, Iowa, Michigan and Indiana, which made it difficult for her to establish friendships.

Marie Tharp attended a class called Current Science, where she learned about contemporary scientists and their research projects.

Marie Tharp spent gap years between high school and college working on her family's farm.

Marie Tharp only permitted Tharp to coordinate maps and data for male colleagues' trips.

Marie Tharp moved to New York City and initially sought work at the American Museum of Natural History.

Marie Tharp eventually found drafting work with Maurice Ewing, the founder of the Lamont Geological Observatory.

Curiously, when interviewed for the job, Marie Tharp did not mention she had a master's degree in geology.

Marie Tharp was one of the first women to work at the Lamont Geological Observatory.

Marie Tharp continued to work on mapping projects from her home, being paid by Heezen through navy contracts.

Marie Tharp was later able to join a 1968 data-collection expedition on the USNS Kane.

Marie Tharp independently used data collected from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's research ship Atlantis, and seismographic data from undersea earthquakes.

Marie Tharp 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.

Marie Tharp created approximately six profiles stretching west to east across the North Atlantic.

Marie 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.

Marie Tharp's name did not appear on any of the major papers on plate tectonics that Heezen and others published between 1959 and 1963.

Marie Tharp continued working with graduate student assistants to further map the extent of the central rift valley.

Marie 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.

Marie Tharp donated her map collection and notes to the Map and Geography Division of the Library of Congress in 1995.

Marie Tharp died of cancer in Nyack, New York, on August 23,2006, at the age of 86.

Marie Tharp was recognized in 1997 by the Library of Congress as one of the four greatest cartographers of the 20th century.

Marie Tharp was animated in "The Lost Worlds of Planet Earth", the ninth episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, and voiced by actress Amanda Seyfried.

On November 21,2022, Google honored Marie Tharp by releasing a Google Doodle, which included narration, mini-games, and animations, telling the story of Marie Tharp's discovery of continental drift and providing historical context for her work.