Hali Felt - Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor

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Contents

This book is for my grandmother

Hilda Hubsher Rifkin (19282009),

who taught me to tell stories.

INTRODUCTION

My mother used to draw maps. Not in the cartographic senseshe had no training in that fieldbut rather in the sense that she rendered them, drew and painted and inked up sheets of paper depicting areas of land that she had studied. She spent hours at the library poring over atlases in the reference section, photocopying in segments the huge pages of the books, then taping them together so shed have something to work from at home.

She liked to complain about all the research she had to do to create even the smallest map. This made sense; as a freelance magazine illustrator, the time she spent on research went largely uncompensated. But she had to do it if her maps were going to meet her editors approval, and I think it was actually her favorite part. I remember waking up in the middle of the night when I was little and stumbling in my bare feet to the other side of our apartment. I could hear the soft laugh track of whatever she had on the television to keep her company as she worked, and as I got closer to her studio I could see the electric light spilling out of it, as if daylight had arrived a few hours early in just this room. And there shed be, all splayed out on her studio floor, the copied maps spread out like a carpet and a pencil between her teeth. When I found her on these nights, shed almost never be looking down at the maps or at the television. Instead, shed be staring off into what would have been the distance if her futon, her flat files, and her dresser hadnt been in the way. I thought she must be thinking about mountains or maybe even plains, and the borders between countries that could shift if she allowed even a tiny tremor in her hand to travel down the wood of her pencil, through the lead, onto the paper. Her illustrations were always meticulous, though; looking at them, I found it obvious that she reveled in all the necessary detail.

While she also drew other things, such as plants, or a Pennsylvania-German type of folk art called fraktur, or hands demonstrating how to, say, lace a shoe, I latched onto the maps without any urging. As a kid I sent away for an orienteering manual that taught me how to navigate through the wilderness with only a map and compass; as a teenager I bought journals and calendars with maps printed on them; and when I moved away from home, I decorated the walls of my bedrooms with maps. I, too, loved how beautiful they were, the grids of streets, the curves of rivers, the green amoebas of parks or forestsmaps were true, but they were also art, a starting point for me to imagine what they represented, what they meant, what was actually on the ground.

I suppose, then, that it isnt surprising that the story of the cartographer Marie Tharp piqued my interest. It was very early on New Years Day 2007, and I discovered her in the New York Times Magazine, part of the 2006 roundup of all the notable people who had died throughout the past year. Some were famous; some were not. The photograph on the cover showed names constructed out of neon tubes and the letters spelling out the words Marie Tharp came just after the ones that spelled out Betty Friedan. Inside the magazine were articles about all these people, short biographical pieces whose intent was unclear. In reading we were not necessarily to mourn, but rather to appreciate the posthumous congregation the Times had organizedor at the very least to acknowledge that the people we were reading about should be remembered, even if they wouldnt be.

Marie Tharp, the header of the article about her said, was a contrary map maker. In the articles first line the author wrote that Marie had red hair and cut a fine figure. In its second line I learned that she had studied English and music before going to graduate school for geology. In the second paragraph I learned that she and her scientific partner, an Iowan named Bruce Heezen, rewrote 20th century geophysics. It was not until the next paragraph that I learned what exactly she had done: from the 1950s to the 1970s she mapped the entire ocean floor and discovered a rift valley that circled the globe.

Science, I have to say, had never been my thing. I avoided it in high school and then college, taking only what was required to graduate. I placed my faith in the subjective. I believed that the act of creation was worth more than a quest for explanations. And so when I first read that article about Marie Tharp in the Times I was attracted to certain elements of the story, to the use of words such as imagine, intuit, and creativity. I loved the idea of a map having been produced as a supreme act of rigorous creativity, tried to imagine her thirty-year-long Hamlet-like relationship with the hulking Heezen.

By the time I reached the end of the article Id learned that they were a couple in a way that lay outside of the bell-shaped curve, fought like cats and dogs, and had just finished a map of the entire ocean floor when tragedy struck. Bruce Heezen had printers proofs of the map with him in 1977, the article said, when he suffered a fatal heart attack on a research vessel off the coast of Iceland. A widow in all but name, Marie Tharp continued to live in [her] house in South Nyack until her death. The article also said that Maries discovery of a rift valley running down the center of the Atlantic essentially proved the theory of continental drift (which said that the Earths surface was made up of moving plates), but when I first read the article what stood out to me was that no one believed herwhen she initially discovered what came to be called the Mid-Oceanic Rift, her claims were dismissed as girl talk. I thought I was reading a classicthe story of an outcast eccentric, a female scientist whose reputation had been the victim of mid-century American gender bias. I was wrong, but also right: the whole story, the true story, was much more complicated.

* * *

A FTER I FIRST read about Marie and had looked at images of her maps from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, I turned to Google Earth for a modern glimpse of the ocean floor. I was disappointed; the oceans fill almost three-quarters of the Earths surface, but the images illustrating them just showed vast swaths of woolly cobalt. When I clicked my cursor to zoom in on any of these spots, I was confronted with pixilated blue nothingness, the virtual equivalent of sailing to the edge of a flat Earth. I told myself that it made sense that nothing was there. Your average person, after all, probably does not need a street view of his new neighborhood on a faraway undersea mountain, does not need step-by-step driving directions to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. On the other hand, most of the people I knew who liked Google Earth used it to explore and meander more than anything else. Theyd go to places they knew theyd probably never be able to visit in their livesislands and volcanoes and rain forests and deserts that they could just drop down into and learn something about without the expense of actually traveling.

The emptiness of the oceans was infuriatingaverage people like me couldnt explore the ocean floor. Maries maps had been around for decades, and I knew that other scientists must have been collecting information since thenwhere had all that data gone? I had learned that the ocean floor was not blank and I could not go back to thinking it was; just as there is not a miniature band huddled inside the radio and schoolteachers do not spend the evenings of their lives camped out in their classrooms, the world does not end where the oceans begin. So as I learned more about Marie and her maps, Id occasionally visit the oceans of Google Earth, let myself plummet down into their cold virtual blue, and imagine the topography she discovered stretched out before me, her illustrations like grand-scale slipcovers for the deep.