To mark International Womens’ Day 2023 it seems fitting to post the first global map of the ocean floor produced by Marie Tharp and her colleague Bruce Heezen in 1977 when it was published in the National Geographic magazine.
Twenty years earlier, the pair mapped the floor of the North Atlantic revealing its canyons, ridges and mountains. This led to the development of theories of continental drift and plate tectonics, which at the time were hugely controversial. In 1997, the Library of Congress named Tharp as one of the four greatest cartographers of the 20th century.
Find out more about her at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University
Picture credit to Kenneth Field who added the beer.
