Today’s interactive Google Doodle celebrates the life of Marie Tharp, an American geologist and oceanographic cartographer, who helped prove the theories of continental drift. The doodle highlights Tharp’s crucial work in the field of ocean science and geology spaces that are traditionally male-dominated.
On this day in 1998, the US Library of Congress named Marie Tharp one of the greatest cartographers of the 20th century.
The interactive on Google Doodle features a narration on Tharp’s life and work in various slides. Three women, Caitlyn Larsen, Rebecca Nesel, and Dr Tiara Moore, who are following Tharp’s footsteps, have lent their voices to the narration.
The doodle features the Mid-Atlantic Ridge which is located along the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Users can ping the screen to see the depths of the ocean floor. Users can also “help” Tharp fill in the estimated ocean height by connecting a few dots on the screen. On another slide, a simple swipe will overlay two maps that prove that continental drift exists.
Born on July 30, 1920 in Michigan, Tharp was an only child of a German and Latin teacher mother and her father who was a soil surveyor for the United States Department of Agriculture.
She was first introduced to mapmaking during her trips with her father on his field work.
Tharp is an English and music graduate from Ohio University. She attended the University of Michigan for her master’s degree in petroleum geology—this was particularly impressive given so few women worked in science during this period.
Tharp was one of the first women to work at the Lamont Geological Observatory in New York City. It is here that she met geologist Bruce Heezen. The two worked together extensively. He had once dismissed her findings as “girl talk”.
In 1957, Tharp and Heezen co-published the first map of the ocean floor in the North Atlantic.
Twenty years later, National Geographic published the first world map of the entire ocean floor penned by Tharp and Heezen, titled “The World Ocean Floor.”
Tharp died in August 2006 in New York, at the age of 86.
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