Map a-day-in May (a thirty-one cabinet display)
Marie Tharp the pioneering oceanographer who mapped the ocean floor.
“Not too many people can say this about their lives: The whole world was spread out before me (or at least, the 70 percent of it covered by oceans).I had a blank canvas to fill with extraordinary possibilities, a fascinating jigsaw puzzle to piece together: mapping the world’s vast hidden seafloor. It was a once-in-a-lifetime—a once-in-the-history-of-the-world—opportunity for anyone, but especially for a woman in the 1940s. The nature of the times, the state of the science, and events large and small, logical and illogical, combined to make it all happen.” (Marie Tharp via the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)
Map a-day-in May (a thirty-one cabinet display)
Marie Tharp the pioneering oceanographer who mapped the ocean floor.
Three photos of Marie Tharp
1. A very young Marie in her father's surveying truck, early 1920s.
(Image courtesy of Robert Brunke)
2. Marie during her university years, mid-1940s.
(Image courtesy of the Lamont-Doherty Earth
Observatory)
3. posed Marie pretending to work on the physiographic diagram of the North Atlantic Ocean in Lamont Hall. Sounding records are visible to the left of the diagram, one of the globe prototypes that she and Bruce Heezen constructed sits in the middle, and an enlarged version of her six North Atlantic profiles is propped in the corner. Late 1950s.
(Image courtesy of the Lamont-Doherty Earth
Observatory)
From: Felt, H. (2012). Soundings : the story of the remarkable woman who mapped the ocean floor (1st ed.). Henry Holt and Co.
Illustration from: Burleigh, R. (2016). Solving the puzzle under the sea : Marie Tharp maps the ocean floor (R. Colón (ed.)). Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.
Caption: I'm Marie Tharp, and my love of maps began way back in the 1930s, when I was a girl. My father's job was to make maps that helped farmers understand different kinds of soil and what they could be used for. I liked to watch as Dad drew his maps. Sometimes I held his pads and pencils as he worked,
Dad traveled from state to state to make his maps-from Michigan, to Iowa, to Alabama, and beyond-and the whole family moved along with him. I had attended seventeen schools by the time I graduated high school. Try topping that!
One of my top 5 overedges of all time - showing Tasmania and New Zealand above and below the water. Great example of physiographic mapping or “diagram” or “landform map” which shows perspective (Raisz., 1956). It is intermediate in style between the old-fashioned hachured topographic map (e.g., see Imhof, 1950) and the modern geomorphologic map.
Raisz, E. J., 1956, Landform maps, Petermanns Geogr. Mitt., 100(2), 171–172.
Imhof, E., 1950, Gelände und Karte, Erlenbach-Zürich, E. Rentsch Verl., 255pp.
From: Tharp, Marie and Heezen, Bruce C. (1971). Physiographic diagram of the western Pacific Ocean. Geological Society of America.
Map a-day-in May (a thirty-one cabinet display)
Marie Tharp the pioneering oceanographer who mapped the ocean floor.
For more info/links: #cartobibliography tinyurl.com/34hn54c3
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