Marie Tharp
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- In 1912, Alfred Wegner proposed the continental drift theory, stating that once the earth was one giant landmass known as Pangea, and over time it separated into what it is today. Sadly his theory was rejected, but luckily a cartographer named Marie Tharp proved his theory to be right.
- Marie's story starts when she is a child. Her father worked for the department for agriculture and allowed her to join him on his work trips around the country to collect soil samples to analyze. The work trips Marie took with her father are what had inspired her to become a geologist and get a degree in the subject in college later in the future.
- She later landed a job at Columbia University, where she worked as an assistant to a geologist named Bruce Heezen on his project to collect ocean dept measurements of the Atlantic ocean. He collected his measurements by something he called "echo sounding". The process of echo sounding is sending out high-frequency sounds and recording the time it took to hear the echo.
- Back in that time, women weren't allowed to join the expeditions because men thought they'd bring "bad luck", so Marie stayed behind and converted the measurements sent to her into detailed profiles of the ocean floor. Her profiles disproved that the ocean floor was flat and that they actually have complex geography to them. Tharp had also found rift valleys in her profiles which offered more evidence for Wegner's continental drift theory.
- After her theory was rejected and considered "girl talk", she collaborated with a fellow colleague named Howard Foster, who was plotting earthquakes in the same location as the rift valleys she was observing. They studied other areas and realized that mid-ocean ridges and earthquakes were occurring in the same place. With all this evidence it became impossible for scientists to continue ignoring her.
- In 1957 Tharp's findings were reported but Jaques Cousteau thought they were wrong and went on his own exhibition and film the ocean floor to prove he was right, but instead, it provided even more evidence to Tharp's maps.
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