Before I started a geology blog, I used to sporadically blog about geology over at
Skepchick. These days, I blog here at Georneys about geology, and I blog over at Skepchick about other skeptical and scientific things, such as the silliness of having
no 13th floor in buildings. Occasionally, I will re-post some of my old geology posts from Skepchick. I will also sometimes cross-post on both blogs.
The post below originally appeared on Skepchick in 2007
here.
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| The 1977 World Ocean Floor Map created by Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp. Image taken from here. |
One of the most famous world maps is the 1977 World Ocean Floor Map (see above) created by Bruce Heezen and
Marie Tharp, a pioneering female oceanographer and kick-ass female scientist. Prior to the publication of this map, scientists had very little idea of what the seafloor looked like on a global scale.
Although the concepts of mid-ocean ridges and plate tectonics seem innate to the work of oceanographers and geochemists today, these concepts are remarkably recent in their development. Plate tectonics was not fully accepted by the scientific community until the late 1960s and early 1970s, and this first great seafloor map was not published until the late 1970s. Mid-ocean ridges were not discovered until the work of Heezen and Tharp in the 1950s and 1960s.
