Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
One branch of the new research produced one of the most startling images in
science. It originated in the bathymetric data that had become available during
the war, collected and converted into a map by Bruce Heezen, Marie Tharp, and
Maurice Ewing of the Lamont Geological Observatory of Columbia University.
The map revealed that running the length of the Atlantic Ocean floor, undulating
so as to remain roughly equidistant from the continents on either side, riven by in-
numerablesteep,elongated“valleys,”liesahugeunderseamountainchain.Scient-
ists had known since the
Challenger
expedition in 1872 that the floor of the central
Atlantic has some sort of undersea rise, and Taylor in 1910 had anticipated some
of the later findings. But before the detailed wartime bathymetry, no one had sus-
pected the true size and character of the great undersea range. The Lamont scient-
ists went on to find that the submerged mountain chain loops around the Cape of
Good Hope, under the Indian Ocean, and on through the southern and eastern Pa-
cific Oceans, encircling the globe like a gargantuan Frankensteinian scar. This, the
greatest feature on the surface of the Earth, had lain hidden until the 1950s.
The map became world famous in 1968 as one of a set of paintings of the sea-
floor by the Austrian artist and cartographer Heinrich Berran, distributed world-
wide by the National Geographic Society.
ThemapoftheAtlanticFloorhadfarmoreofaneffectonthemindsofscientists
than the maps showing the matching coastlines of South America and southern
Africa, from which Alfred Wegener and countless others had drawn inspiration.
After all, the fit of the two continents could have been a coincidence. But the tor-
tuous Atlantic seafloor could not possibly be put down to coincidence. Here lay
what resembled the skeleton of an enormous sea creature, its head, spine, and tail
visible, carved into slivers as though by a master sushi chef. Ancient mapmakers
once denoted unexplored regions with the words, “Here Be Dragons.” They were
not so wrong, after all.
