発展歴史・文化

The Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor

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Marie Tharp was born in the United States in 1920. Her father made maps of soils for the , and as a child she often traveled with him and watched him work. At that time, few women studied , and universities accepted them in subjects such as geology. During the Second World War, however, many students left for the army, and some departments opened their doors to women in to the empty seats. Tharp entered one of them. After the war she found work at a in New York. Women were not allowed on the ships, so while her colleagues measured the depth of the ocean from the deck, Tharp stayed on . Sheets of paper covered with numbers arrived from the ships, and she turned them into drawings, line by line. Each voyage produced only a single line of measurements, and the wide spaces between the lines had to be filled in by careful reasoning. Over several years she produced pictures of the floor of the Atlantic Ocean that no one had ever seen before. As she worked, she noticed a deep valley running down the middle of a long chain of underwater mountains. To her it looked as though the ocean floor was being pulled . When she told her colleague Bruce Heezen, he called the idea nonsense, since the that continents move had few supporters at the time. Only after recordings of earthquakes were compared with her maps, and the earthquakes were found to lie along the same valley, did he change his mind. Her maps were published in the 1950s and helped scientists that the continents really do move. For many years, however, her name appeared below that of her colleague, and she received little attention. A of her map was later printed in a magazine read around the world. Only late in her life was her work widely honored. Today her maps are remembered not only for what they showed but also for how they were made, since the person who drew the ocean floor in such was never permitted to sail across it.