About Us
The business of Marie Tharp Maps represents the life’s work of preeminent oceanographic cartographer Marie Tharp. Working in conjunction with Bruce Heezen and Columbia University, Marie was able to compile a complete and accurate map of the ocean floor.
Before Marie’s map, it was generally assumed that the ocean floor was flat, with a few mountainous outcroppings. Her map changed everything. Marie discovered a rift down the center of the mid-Atlantic ridge. This rift was indicative of volcanic activity, and provided evidence of seafloor spreading, or continental drift. Bruce originally rejected this idea, but when presented with the completed map, the proof was undeniable.
Collaborating with Austrian landscape painter Heinrich Berann, Marie and the Office of Naval Research published the World Ocean Floor map in 1977. This map is still in wide use today.
To quote the New York Times:
The “World Ocean Floor,” published in 1977, looked as if someone had pulled the plug on a globe-size bathtub, draining all the water from the world’s oceans and revealing hidden features of the earth’s surface. The map showed a continuous, 40,000-mile-long seam running across the world’s surface, like the stitching on a throbbing geophysical baseball. Sounding like the proud discoverer that she was, Tharp said, “You can’t find anything bigger than that, at least on this planet.”
Marie worked very closely with Columbia University at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory until her retirement, at which point the focus of her career shifted to the sale and publication of her maps.
We are carrying on her great legacy as she intended.
