Marie Tharp

Marie Tharp was an American geologist and oceanic cartographer who co-created the first detailed map of the Atlantic Ocean floor and, in the process, discovered the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, providing vital proof of the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift.

After an unsatisfying stint as a junior geologist for Standard Oil, in 1948 Tharp found a job at the Lamont Geological Observatory (now the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory). She initially worked on using photographic evidence to locate World War II aircraft that had ditched at sea, which involved plotting the sea floor.

That work evolved into an ocean floor mapping project. Her colleague, Bruce Heezen, collected sonar soundings data from trips on research ships, and Tharp analysed it back at base, as she was not allowed onboard. This collaboration was the first systematic attempt to map the ocean floor, which at the time was assumed to be flat and uninteresting.

Tharp plotted out the data by hand to create six east-west profiles and discovered not just a long ridge running down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, but an enormous rift valley in the middle of the ridge itself.

The idea of continental drift was controversial at the time, but a rift valley would be evidence that the oceanic crust was pulling apart, with new crust being erupted along the undersea mountain range. Tharp’s conclusions were dismissed by Heezen as “girl talk”.

Further evidence that Tharp was correct came from a map of earthquake epicentres which, when laid over her map, matched perfectly with the central rift valley. In 1957, Heezen published Tharp’s work and took credit for it – her name appears nowhere on that paper, nor on any of the other papers published by him or others between 1959 and 1963.

Tharp continued to map ocean floors, and found similar mid-ocean ridges in the Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea, Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. She had discovered a global oceanic rift system.

In 1978, Tharp (and Heezen, posthumously) were awarded the Hubbard Medal, the National Geographic Society’s highest honour. She was also awarded the Mary Sears Woman Pioneer in Oceanography Award by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1998, and won the Lamont-Doherty Heritage Award by the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Further reading

• Marie Tharp, Wikipedia
• Marie Tharp: The Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor, Meg Rosenburg, TrowelBlazers
• Marie Tharp: The Woman Who Mapped The Ocean Floor, Hali Felt, HuffPost, 28 October 2012
• July 30, 1920: Marie Tharp, the Woman who discovered the Backbone of Earth, David Bressan, Scientific American, 30 July 2013
• Pioneering woman who mapped the ocean floor, Kate Ravilious, The Guardian, 13 March 2016
• Seeing Is Believing: How Marie Tharp Changed Geology Forever, Erin Blakemore, Smithsonian Magazine, 30 August 2016
• How One Brilliant Woman Mapped the Secrets of the Ocean Floor (video), Rosanna Wan, National Geographic, 12 February 2017
• Four facts about Marie Tharp, the woman whose art mapped the bottom of the sea, Cassie Freund, Massive Science, 1 February 2018
• Making Continents Move: The Ocean Cartography of Marie Tharp, Dale Debakcsy, Women You Should Know, 22 February 2018
• Marie Tharp, The Woman Who Discovered The Backbone Of Earth, David Bressan, Forbes, 30 July 2018
• Marie Tharp pioneered mapping the bottom of the ocean 6 decades ago – scientists are still learning about Earth’s last frontier, Suzanne OConnell, The Conversation, 28 July 2020
• How Marie Tharp Changed Geology Forever, David Bressan, Forbes, 30 July 2020
• Why pioneering oceanographer Marie Tharp deserves to be remembered as one of science’s greats, Suzanne O’Connell, The Independent, 9 August 2020
• Marie Tharp’s groundbreaking maps brought the seafloor to the world, Betsy Mason, Science News, 13 January 2021
• Marie Tharp: Pioneering Mapmaker of the Ocean Floor, WHOI Women’s Committee, 11 March 2021
• Marie Tharp: Mapping the Ocean Floor, Neely Tucker, Library of Congress, 9 August 2021

This Podcast Will Kill You, Erin Welsh & Erin Allmann Updike

This podcast might not actually kill you, but it covers so many things that can. Each episode tackles a different disease, from its history, to its biology, and finally, how scared you need to be. Erin Welsh and Erin Allmann Updyke, who are both disease ecologists and epidemiologists, make infectious diseases acceptable fodder for dinner party conversation and provide the perfect cocktail recipe to match. 

Recent episodes cover a variety of diseases: 

• Diabetes mellitus: Short & sweet.
• Anthrax: The hardcore spore.
• Chagas disease: The reverse triple discovery.
• Dysentery loves a disaster.
• Hemophilia: A hemorrhagic disposition.

You can follow their work here:

Twitter: @theedubs, epidemicerin, and @tpwky
Facebook: facebook.com/thispodcastwillkillyou

Dr Jeanne Lee Crews

Dr Jeanne Lee Crews is a NASA aerospace engineer who designed a flexible multi-shock shield to protect spacecraft from debris, and which is still in use on the International Space Station.

Lee Crews joined NASA in 1964, one of the first female engineers to join the agency. She initially worked on the Apollo missions, identifying landmarks that the astronauts could use to navigate by, if primary systems failed. During this project, she became one of the first women to go on a zero-G flight.

She later began the hyper-velocity laboratory, where she worked on developing advanced protection for spacecraft and satellites. It was, by then, already clear that collisions with even very small pieces of space debris, travelling at orbital speeds, can cause severe damage. Lee Crews built a small hydrogen fuelled gun to begin testing materials to see how well they withstood high-velocity impacts. She rapidly realised that the aluminium usually used to build spacecraft was vulnerable to debris collisions so, to achieve better protection, she developed a shield comprising multiple layers of ceramic fabric, open-cell foam and other materials.

More recently, Lee Crews has been working on a method to collect orbital debris. Her design calls for a very large balloon, between 1km and 10km in diameter, made of ceramic fabric, that will “shock whatever has struck the craft so much that it is vaporised. If you have four or five sheets, one behind the other, you shock it repeatedly and raise energy levels so much you get more vaporisation and it gets smaller and smaller.” Once full, the balloon would be returned to Earth.

Lee Crews has received many awards, including the Women in Aerospace Lifetime Achievement Award, the NASA Exceptional Service Medal, and the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal.

Further reading

• Jeanne Lee Crews, Wikipedia
• NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project Edited Oral History Transcript, Rebecca Wright, NASA, 6 August 2007
• Science: Sucked from space, Roger Dobson, The Independent, 23 October 2011

Built on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death, Dr Brenna Hassett

Imagine you are a hunter-gatherer some 15,000 years ago. You’ve got a choice – carry on foraging, or plant a few seeds and move to one of those new-fangled settlements down the valley. What you won’t know is that urban life is short and riddled with dozens of new diseases; your children will be shorter and sicklier than you are, they’ll be plagued with gum disease, and stand a decent chance of a violent death at the point of a spear.

Why would anyone choose this? This is one of the many intriguing questions tackled by Brenna Hassett in Built on Bones. Using research on skeletal remains from around the world, this book explores the history of humanity’s experiment with the metropolis, and looks at why our ancestors chose city life, and why they have largely stuck to it. It explains the diseases, the deaths and the many other misadventures that we have unwittingly unleashed upon ourselves throughout the metropolitan past, and as the world becomes increasingly urbanised, what we can look forward to in the future.

Telling the tale of shifts in human growth and health that have occurred as we transitioned from a mobile to a largely settled species. Built on Bones offers an accessible insight into a critical but relatively unheralded aspect of the human story: our recent evolution.

Order the book on Bookshop.org.uk here and your purchase will support a local independent bookshop of your choice!

You can follow her work here:

Twitter: @brennawalks
Website: passiminpassing.blogspot.com

Deep ocean exploration – Dr Diva Amon, 2018

Dr Diva Amon takes us underneath the waves to explore the deep ocean, and the very bizarre love lives of some of the creatures living there. 

Dr Diva Amon is a Trinidadian deep-sea biologist who studies chemosynthetic habitats and human impacts on the deep ocean. She is a Scientific Associate at the Natural History Museum in London, where she also undertook a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellowship. In 2013, she completed her PhD at the University of Southampton, after which, she spent three years at the University of Hawai’i, researching the largely unknown abyssal fauna of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, an area targeted for deep-sea mining in the Pacific Ocean. Throughout her career, Diva has participated in deep-sea expeditions around the world, exploring and studying previously unknown habitats, while trying her best to communicate the wonders of the deep ocean. Diva is also a co-founder of the non-profit NGO, SpeSeas. 

You can follow her work here:

Website: https://divaamon.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DivaAmon
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/diva-amon/

Recorded at the IET and sponsored by Digital Science, you can watch the rest of the Ada Lovelace Day Live 2018 playlist here.