Oral History | Marie Tharp, one of the greatest cartographers of the 20th century

How do we know what we know about the seafloor?

“File:(Manuscript painting of Heezen-Tharp World ocean floor map by Berann).jpg” by Berann, Heinrich C., Heezen, Bruce C., Tharp, Marie. is marked with CC0 1.0

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.”

Bruce and Marie with the map” is licensed under CC BY 2.0

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