How do we know what we know about the seafloor?

From the maps and drawings of Marie Tharp — a woman who the Library of Congress named as one of the four greatest cartographers of the 20th century.

As colleagues from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory note in a revealing post about Tharp:

Because of her gender, she wasn’t even allowed on the ships that collected the seafloor data that she used to make her maps; she didn’t set foot on a research cruise until 1968. Her early evidence of seafloor spreading was dismissed as “girl talk.”

Read the full post and explore Tharp’s 1997 oral history in the OHAC collections:

• Interview transcript accessible on the American Institute of Physics website.
• Interview audio accessible in the Digital Library Collection with Columbia University log in.