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FROM ARTICLE:

Moving to New York in 1948, Tharp was employed by Maurice Ewing at the Lamont Geological Laboratory (now the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory) at Columbia University, initially as a general drafter. There, Tharp met Bruce Heezen, and in early work together they used photographic data to locate downed aircraft from World War II. Tharp was employed and continuously promoted from 1952 to 1968, when her position was cut and moved to grant-funded status due to lab politics involving Heezen (she remained in a grant-funded position until Heezen's death in 1977). Later, they began working together to map the topography of the ocean floor. For the first 18 years of their collaboration, Heezen collected bathymetric data aboard the research ship, the Vema, while Tharp drew maps from that data since women were still excluded from working aboard ship at that time. Although restricted from conducting research at sea early in her career due to her gender, she was later able to join a 1968 data-collection expedition. Tharp independently used data collected from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's research ship Atlantis, and seismographic data from undersea earthquakes. Her work with Heezen represented the first systematic attempt to map the entire ocean floor.

NEW INFORMATION:

In 1952, Tharp painstakingly aligned sounding profiles from the Atlantis, acquired during 1946 - 1952, and one profile from the Naval ship Stewart acquired during 1921. She created a total of approximately 6 profiles stretching west-to-east across the North Atlantic. From these profiles, she was able to examine the bathymetry of the northern sections of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Tharp identified an aligned, v-shaped structure running continuously through the center of the ridge and believed that it may be a rift valley.

Howard Foster was soon hired by Heezen to plot the location of earthquake epicenters in the oceans for a project relating large-scale turbidity currents with earthquakes. Despite being for a separate project, the creation of this earthquake epicenter map proved to be a useful secondary dataset for examining the bathymetry of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Previous scientists Beno Gutenberg and Charles Richter had identified a correlation between the location of shallow earthquakes with the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. However, when Foster's map of earthquake epicenters was overlain with Tharp's profile of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge it became clear that the location of these earthquakes aligned with Tharp's rift valley. After putting together these two datasets, Tharp became convinced that a rift valley did exist within the crest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

Tharp then began examining soundings from cruises by the German ship Meteor completed in 1925 - 1927. From these soundings, Tharp identified that the rift valley extended along with the Mid-Atlantic Ridge into the South Atlantic.