Taxacom: Marie Tharp

[Tony Rees]

Hi John,

I am sure there is something in what you say (Tharp never being the senior
author etc. on their joint contributions, announcements being made by "the
men" at meetings). However reading a bit further - e.g. Tharp's own account
in "Mappers of the Deep" by Marie Tharp and Henry Frankel, 1966 ( Natural
History, 10, 4-62) it seems clear (to me) that they worked together as a
team and considered everything "their" work - with contributions from both
parties - Tharp seems to be the first to suggest that there was a rift
valley common to her initial 6 profiles, but Bruce Heezen did a lot of the
subsequent brainstorming / advancement in "their" thinking in addition to
collecting all the data. Some of the feel of this partnership is conveyed
by Sharp's text as included below, if you care to read through it of
course. As with you, it makes interesting reading... I do not think Tharp
is being unduly deferential here, she considered that they worked as a
team, and gives much credit to Heezen in the lead role; apparently she
planned to write Heezen's biography as well, following his early death (at
sea, collecting more data) but I am not sure it appeared, apart from a
bibliography of his collected works.

Anyway, read on below, if interested...

Regards - Tony


Tharp including such phraseology as:
" Bruce Heezen, then a graduate student in geology at Columbia University,
and I, a graduate geologist, were working at Columbia’s Lamont (now
Lamont-Doherty) Geological Observatory when we made such a discovery—the
central rift valley in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. In 1952, I became convinced
of the valley’s existence along a segment of the ridge. Within about six
months Bruce agreed and began to wonder about its significance...  one day
we decided, quite suddenly, to make a physiographic diagram of the ocean
floor. Unlike flat contour maps that do not bring out the
three-dimensionality in pictorial form, physiographic diagrams look
three-dimensional. They show the terrain as it would look from a low flying
plane. After an hour or so of scribbling, Bruce produced our first
physiographic diagram. By 1952, he had been on enough cruises to enable him
to discover most of the features of the western Atlantic. Although he was
somewhat unhappy with the results of his efforts and asked me to do the
diagram over, both of us were pleased with the technique." ...

" Bruce hired Howard Foster, a young, deaf graduate of the Boston School of
Fine Arts who did all his work by hand (since the age of the computer had
not yet arrived), to plot the location of recorded earthquakes in the
Atlantic and other parts of the world. He plotted tens of thousands. The
records weren’t as accurate as our own topographical data, and Bruce
complained that the scatter of one to several hundred miles in the
positions of the plotted earthquake epicenters “was absolutely abominable”
compared with our topographical data of the sea floor. While I was at my
map table plotting the position of the MidAtlantic Ridge and the alleged
valley, a map of the same scale as mine, showing the position of the
earthquakes, sat on an adjoining table—Bruce always insisted that all our
oceanographic data be mapped at the same scale. He noticed that a line of
epicenters from shallow-focus earthquakes ran down the center of  the
Mid-Atlantic Ridge. This, in itself, was nothing new, for we were aware
that two seismologists, Beno Gutenberg and Charles F. Richter, had already
noted in their widely read book, Seismicity of the Earth (published in
1944), that an active belt of shallow earthquakes “follows the Ridge very
closely.” (Richter, incidentally, devised the scale bearing his name that
measures the magnitude of earthquakes.) But we found more: taking into
account the inaccuracy of the plotted positions of the earthquake
epicenters, Bruce saw that they fell within the valley. Because all our
data were on maps of the same scale, the locations of the epicenters within
the valley showed up when we superimposed the maps on a table lighted from
below. At that point, I was completely convinced that the valley was real.
We had a definite association of topography with seismicity. Although Bruce
remained somewhat skeptical, he began to pursue the idea in earnest." ...

"Just as his predecessors had extrapolated the existence of the southern
extension of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge from the differences in temperature
between deep-sea currents on both sides of the Atlantic, Bruce reasoned
that deep-sea soundings would reveal a ridge wherever shallow earthquakes
had occurred. ...  Bruce keyed in on the terrestrial extension of the
hypothesized oceanic-ridge system—the rift-valley system of the East
African Plateau. He reasoned that since the system of rift valleys in east
Africa appeared to be a landward extension of the oceanic-ridge system, he
could learn about the oceanic part by studying the terrestrial. I made up
profiles of some of the valleys in east Africa. Bruce noted the
topographical similarities between the two sets of profiles: one across the
ocean; the other across the land. He also saw that the belt of shallow
earthquakes associated with the system of east African rift valleys stayed
primarily within the confines of the valley walls. He decided to make the
jump and endorse the existence of a central valley within the ridge itself
that extended along the entire axis of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge system. As far
as Bruce was concerned, the tightness of the analogy between the
terrestrial and oceanic segments of the ridge system was the clincher.
Before, even with  the seismic data, he was not sure if the valley’s
presence on the original six profiles and other oceanic ones that we found
was an accident or indicated a real feature of the ridge. Bruce stressed
the importance of the analogy by calling the oceanic valley a rift valley,
borrowing the term rift from the characterization of the African valleys as
rift valleys. And with the “rift” designation came Bruce’s suggestion that
the central rift valley, whether in the oceanic or terrestrial part of the
overall ridge system, was a huge tension crack in the earth’s crust caused
by a splitting apart of the earth’s crust."


On Sat, 30 Sept 2023 at 01:51, John Grehan <calabar.john at gmail.com> wrote:

> Heezan may have given 'credit' where due, but one wonders why Tharpe was
> not given lead authorship. After all, she appears to have made the
> conceptual leap, which was initially dismissed out of hand. But as Heezen
> becomes lead author, the trend for historical recognition appears to lean
> towards him rather than Tharpe, presumably because he was lead author and
> the public conference face.
>
> These days when a student in a research lab makes a discovery they are at
> least allowed to be lead author even though the lab head may be responsible
> for all the resources that made the discoveries happen [which may be all
> that Heezen did in this instance - i.e. Heezen etc did not make the
> intellectual insight, or am I wrong about that?]. My impression is that
> Tharpe made a discovery that was not obvious to her colleagues when seeing
> the same data. That would make her stand out remarkably in the history of
> science. It's one thing to be first to recognize something (which is
> happenstance) but another to recognize something that others with the same
> data can or could not). One might also speculate about her status if she
> had been allowed to directly gather 'data' - which I understand that she
> could not because the marine crew of the research vessels still lived in
> the medieval world where female crew (not passengers) was considered bad
> luck.
>
>  And interesting that she apparently stuck to her viewpoint nevertheless
> (modern research labs are often like cults, one has to accept the PI belief
> system in order to belong, and one has to parrott those beliefs when
> publishing or doom one's career prospects [equivalent to cult ostracizing
> those who leave or escape]).
>
> All the above is rhetorical, does not require any necessary response. Very
> interested to see the comments thus far.
>
> Cheers, John
>