Ocean Forms - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 46

iconic images of the oceans ever made. Matthew Maury, in one of his
many vivid phrases, had once written, a touch rhetorically—'Could
the waters of the Atlantic be drawn off, so as to expose to view . . . the
very ribs of the solid earth . . . the cradle of the oceans?' This is exactly
what Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp set out to do in the 1950s—and
in which they succeeded magnificently.
They both worked at the Lamont Geological Observatory of
Columbia University in the USA. Bruce Heezen, an oceanographer,
sailed in the Observatory's ship to collect data on the sea floor. Women
were not then allowed on board ship, so Marie Tharp stayed behind
and drew the maps made from the data that Bruce collected (she did
not get to go on an expedition until 1965). The first maps were pro-
duced in 1959. Most people around the world saw them as the memo-
rable supplements to the National Geographic , the Atlantic map being
the first of these, published in the summer of 1968. They were quite
literally memorable: for people of that generation had never seen the
like before. One author of the words you are reading was then an
impressionable 14 years of age, and vividly recalls the moment of
unfolding the map.
The sea floor, once the water was removed, looked much more dra-
matic, much more like something from science fiction than anything
on land. Even the mighty Cordillera did not compare to the Mid-
Atlantic Ridge, which marched almost from pole to pole, with an
extraordinary array of fractures that cut across it. No wonder that
Maurice Ewing (Heezen and Tharp's boss at the Observatory) talked
of 'millions of miles of a tangled jumble of massive peaks, sawtoothed
ridges, earthquake-shattered cliffs'.
It is a work of art, and in many ways an imaginative work of art. For
the map looks superbly and convincingly detailed, and yet Heezen
had not been able to collect anywhere near enough data to map the
sea floor in such detail. Marie Tharp, employing much intuition and a