Ocean Forms - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 45

It was Maury's 200 carefully organized soundings across the Atlan-
tic (carried out to enable the first transatlantic cable to be laid) that
first showed the existence of a higher region in the middle of this
ocean. His 1855 map admittedly shows the ridge as a vague, elongated
blob in the North Atlantic. Nevertheless, this underwater 'plateau'
was the first hint of the ocean's grand underlying structure. Hum-
boldt himself was impressed by the work, which was not only techni-
cally meticulous but evocatively described (Maury, on his long
voyages, used to read and reread the works of Shakespeare). Maury
had, Humboldt said, invented a new science: the physical geography
of the sea.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the pioneering oceano-
graphic ship HMS Challenger took further soundings, and confirmed
the existence of the mid-Atlantic 'plateau'. It was one of many achieve-
ments of this astonishing little ship: 60 metres long and 12 metres
across, squeezing in—or starting out with, more precisely—269
men. 39 Between 1872 and 1876 it sailed 100,000 kilometres across
the oceans, through all climates, carrying out brutally hard and
demanding work. 40 The result was the first systematic picture of the
oceans: of the general shape of the ocean basins, of the nature of the
waters, and of the deep-sea sediments and animals that were brought
up, day after day, by the dredge buckets from 4 kilometres or more
below the sea's surface. Its results, described in 50 volumes, were the
beginning of oceanography as an organized science.
The true shape of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, though, only began to be
slowly revealed after the First World War, when echo-sounding—a
more illuminating technique than the Challenger 's sounding lines—
began to be used systematically to reveal the shape of the ocean floor.
And people only began to see what the ocean floor looked like after
the Second World War. A remarkable scientific partnership then
began to combine art and science to conjure up perhaps the most