Soundings: The Story Of The Remarkable Woman Who Mapped The Ocean Floor (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
I have been a map aficionado for as long as I can remember. When I was ten years old, my grandmother gave me a membership in the National Geographic Society. The impressive certificate of membership indicates that I was elected by "the Board of Trustees at a meeting held in Washington District of Columbia..." and is dated April 19, 1956. I still have every magazine from that date to the present. Several times per year, the issue would have a wonderful map included with the issue. The maps would be of a specific region, or zooming out to the whole world, or more properly to the land surface of the world, a mere 29% of Earth's surface. That all changed with the issue of October 1967, when the map included with my wonderful yellow-bordered magazine was entitled "Indian Ocean Floor" - "based on bathymetric studies by Bruce C. Heezen and Marie Tharp."This book describes how Marie Tharp began interpolating and extrapolating ocean floor topography from ship-track soundings made by the precision depth recorders (PDR) on various oceanographic research cruises. With the collaboration of Bruce Heezen, the job of turning these fuzzy lines into a map of the 71% of Earth that is underwater took from 1952 until 1977. Marie postulated that the Mid-Atlantic Ridge contained a rift valley some two miles deep, and in no small part helped validate the developing theory of plate tectonics.I became a geology student in 1965, five years before the term "plate tectonics" was coined. Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor by Hali Felt examines the life of Marie Tharp. As a fan of biographies and particular books about women, I found this book to be an excellent addition to my biography collection.[return][return]The book traces her life and accomplishments including her foundational work in oceanographic cartography. While most biographies focus primarily on the life of the subject, the author chose to weave in the science behind the story to help readers better understand the importance of Tharp's work.[return][return]I was disappointed in the lack of visuals. The author describes photos, but doesn't provide them. She talked about the beauty of maps, but don't show them.[return][return]This well-researched biography provides insights into a little known woman who had a big impact on geology. However the informal almost conversational writing style doesn't always seem to mesh with the sometimes scholarly tone. Although the book contains a note section with references, I was looking for a more detailed set of citations and notes. Also, there were times where I wasn't sure where the factual information from interviews ended and the author's interpretation of events began.[return][return]To see the impact of Tharp's works, it's possible see her maps overlapped on Google Earth.
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