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    Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor
    Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor
    Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor
    Ebook488 pages7 hours

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

    By Hali Felt

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Her maps of the ocean floor have been called "one of the most remarkable achievements in modern cartography", yet no one knows her name.

    Soundings is the story of the enigmatic, unknown woman behind one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century. Before Marie Tharp, geologist and gifted draftsperson, the whole world, including most of the scientific community, thought the ocean floor was a vast expanse of nothingness. In 1948, at age 28, Marie walked into the newly formed geophysical lab at Columbia University and practically demanded a job. The scientists at the lab were all male; the women who worked there were relegated to secretary or assistant. Through sheer willpower and obstinacy, Marie was given the job of interpreting the soundings (records of sonar pings measuring the ocean's depths) brought back from the ocean-going expeditions of her male colleagues. The marriage of artistry and science behind her analysis of this dry data gave birth to a major work: the first comprehensive map of the ocean floor, which laid the groundwork for proving the then-controversial theory of continental drift.

    When combined, Marie's scientific knowledge, her eye for detail and her skill as an artist revealed not a vast empty plane, but an entire world of mountains and volcanoes, ridges and rifts, and a gateway to the past that allowed scientists the means to imagine how the continents and the oceans had been created over time.

    Just as Marie dedicated more than twenty years of her professional life to what became the Lamont Geological Observatory, engaged in the task of mapping every ocean on Earth, she dedicated her personal life to her great friendship with her co-worker, Bruce Heezen. Partners in work and in many ways, partners in life, Marie and Bruce were devoted to one another as they rose to greater and greater prominence in the scientific community, only to be envied and finally dismissed by their beloved institute. They went on together, refining and perfecting their work and contributing not only to humanity's vision of the ocean floor, but to the way subsequent generations would view the Earth as a whole.

    With an imagination as intuitive as Marie's, brilliant young writer Hali Felt brings to vivid life the story of the pioneering scientist whose work became the basis for the work of others scientists for generations to come.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 2, 2013
    ISBN9781466847460
    Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor
    Author

    Hali Felt

    Hali Felt teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa and has completed residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and Portland Writers in the Schools. In the past, she has reported for the Columbia Journalism Review and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. She is the author of the book Soundings. She currently lives in Pittsburgh.

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    Reviews for Soundings

    3.5/5

    22 ratings9 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Interesting story, but the author chose to present masses of data and detail at the expense of keeping my interest. DNF, not because I wanted to not finish, but rather because the fiction I was reading was so much more gripping
    • 4/5
      I read this for my work's Book Club. And it was a great choice, but this is a book I would have enjoyed reading regardless, but I think for many of the the members, it was difficult to get through.Marie Tharp is one of the people that was always behind the greatness - she drew the first maps of the mid-ocean ridge System, a continuous ring of volcanoes and valleys that are found on the edges of continents. This is a big deal because it proved the existence of plate tectonic theory, which at the time, was considered a fringe theory and those that believed in it was not invited to conferences and discussions.Marie did not work by herself - as a women in the 1950's, even one with a degree, she did no research herself, did not get her name on any papers, and her contribution to projects was usually as a drafter/illustrator - creating maps and graphs for the male scientists around her. As a result, she isn't well know outside of a small group of people. To confuse matters, it was only she was working with Bruce Heezen, was she able to add her own ideas. However, even then, she was not given credit and as a result, its impossible to figure what was hers and what was Bruce'sHowever, she is given full credit for the maps she made today. Unfortunately, the wider geological society assumed that she made them with Bruce overseeing the work, over time, the two scientists were seen as a duo, but once Bruce passed away, all his work was given to other scientists, even though Marie was doing the majority of the work on it.This book is well written and well researched. The author clearly wanted to be respectful of the scientist, but at times, I felt took liberties with the scenery and conversation - by the authors own admittance, while she could place Marie Thorp in a certain place and time, she made up the conversation. This isn't always bad and in places, actually adds to the book. But other times, I found that it was more distracting than it actually was.One last thing - I would have liked to see more of how scientific community was convinced of plate tectonic theory. Marie wasn't involved in this, but her maps had a lot to do with changing of minds. I suspect the author made a point to stick to Marie and Bruce in the book, but making it more clear would have cemented why this map is so important.Highly recommended, but it can be dense.
    • 2/5
      Interesting story, but the author chose to present masses of data and detail at the expense of keeping my interest. DNF, not because I wanted to not finish, but rather because the fiction I was reading was so much more gripping
    • 4/5
      Hali Felt's Soundings follows in the literary footsteps of Dava Sobel (Longitude and Galileo's Daughter) and Simon Winchester (The Professor and the Madman and, especially, The Map that Changed the World). Like them, it uses the life of a brilliant, eccentric, obsessive individual to illuminate a larger historical story in which they played a key role. Here, as other reviewers have noted, the individual is cartographer Marie Tharp and the story is that of the mapping of the ocean floor and its role in the development of the great unifying concept of twentieth-century geology: the theory of plate tectonics. The individual -- according to the logic of this kind of historical writing -- is the focus of the book and, indeed, the book's reason for existence. The biographical details are the sweet glaze that makes the wholesome-but-dry background material palatable to readers who would not, normally, pick up a book on the history of science or technology by choice.So it is with Soundings . . . and if you relish the work of Dava Sobel and Simon Winchester, read no further. Go out and get yourself a copy of Soundings, comfortable in the knowledge that you'll be enthralled and, along the way, learn a lot about the history of one of the twentieth century's great scientific accomplishments. My relationship with Sobel and Winchester -- and my feelings about Soundings -- are more ambivalent. There's no question that Felt does Marie Tharp justice: The author clearly identifies with her subject, and the tone of the biographical material is that of a fond niece narrating the extraordinary life of a beloved aunt she knew only in retirement and old age. Working from difficult, fragmentary, sometimes contradictory material, Felt skillfully pieces together Tharp's childhood, entry into science, and emerging partnership (professional and perhaps personal) with Bruce Heezen. There's little question that this is the best biography of Tharp we're likely to get, and it's a good one. The scientific background is workmanlike, and covers all the bases needed to understand Tharp's story. It gets the big things right, and the things it gets wrong (conflating multiple senses of "uniformitarianism" and failing to articulate why the "method of multiple working hypotheses" so entranced early 20C American geologists) do not, by any means, upend the narrative.And yet . . . I couldn't shake the feeling that, for all her good intentions and evident hard work, Felt has no feel for the background material: the science and the history of science. Geology, like astronomy, is the science of the unimaginably vast -- of time and space considered on a scale that most people, in their everyday lives, never do. The best geological writers can convey what it feels like to think on that scale, but Felt (who freely admits "I'm not a scientist") never manages it. Tharp's story also has extraordinary historical resonances with figures from Johannes Kepler (who derived the orbit of Mars from reams of numerical data the way Tharp conjured the ocean floor), through Charlotte Murchison (who served, for decades, as cartographer and colorist to her husband Roderick -- the most esteemed geologist of the Victorian era), to Tharp's rough contemporary Rachel Carson, whose early career trajectory was similar but whose impact was far more public. These, too, go under (or un-) considered, and it's hard not to feel that Felt simply wasn't historically aware enough to see them.Soundings is a solid book on an important subject, but it left me longing for the story of Marie Tharp's life as told by a historian of science like Naomi Oreskes (chronicler of the plate tectonics revolution) or Martin Rudwick (who showed historians the primacy of maps and images in geology) . . . or, better yet, by John McPhee, whose Annals of a Former World tetralogy is a master class in interweaving the lives of geologists with the fabric of their science, and (along the way) making the vast seem comprehensible.
    • 4/5
      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.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.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.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.To see the impact of Tharp's works, it's possible see her maps overlapped on Google Earth.
    • 4/5
      This review was also published in GAEA, the newsletter of the Association for Women Geoscientists, so it may show some professional bias. I recieved the book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewer Program. Soundings – The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor, by Hali Felt. Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2012, ISBN 978-0-8050-9215-8I remember the first popularly available map of the ocean floor – it arrived in our home with the National Geographic magazine in 1967. I remember seeing and using other versions of it throughout my college and grad school studies. I also remember reading of Marie Tharp’s death in the New York Times in 2006. Of these events, Hali Felt shares with me only the memory of reading the recap obituary in the Times’ annual review of notable people who died in the previous year. She was sufficiently engaged by that obituary to thoroughly pursue the surviving information and tell Marie’s story in a book that is both biography and an exploration of cartography, marine geology and the birth of Plate Tectonics. Ms. Felt has done a very nice job of telling both Miss Tharp’s personal story and the story of the development of the key maps that allowed development of the Plate Tectonics paradigm that is now the fundamental foundation of our understanding of the Earth. It would be easy to categorize Tharp’s career history as one more example of a woman doing significant work and the men taking all the credit and glory – but it is a more complicated and interesting story. It is very much a story that could not have happened in any other time and place – too many key opportunities, people and realities come together. By today’s standards Tharp was robbed of credit and career advancement, but that message does not dominate the other stories in the book. In very readable prose, Ms. Felt tells the story of Marie Tharp, the relationship between Tharp and her partner Bruce Heezen, and the story of a major change in scientific thinking. Soundings introduces the reader to many of the key scientists in this shift of thinking, at least to the degree that they interacted with Tharp and Heezen, and makes the complicated progress of science accessible to her readers. The book is somewhere between a scholarly biography (it does have a notes section for each chapter and a comprehensive index, but not individual footnotes) and a profile of fascinating characters set in a unique set of circumstances. Like Marie and Bruce’s first maps, there are places where the author fills in some details with educated guesswork. As is the case for the maps, this improves the reader’s picture of a partially documented reality. Anyone who has made a geologic map from limited outcrop data can appreciate the process. I particularly appreciate that the book presents a number of minor stories. Few people now have a grasp of the processes of ink and velum cartography and drafting and printing of large maps, but maps are an essential part of geology and allow visualization that then leads to understanding and development of new ideas. Most of us now working in geology have only stories from our predecessors about times when everyone assumed that appropriate roles for women with advanced degrees included being a human calculator, manually doing the tedious arithmetic to reduce geophysical data to useful form. Marie Tharp, like many geologists had early childhood experiences that prepared and encouraged her interests. Her father was a soil surveyor, moving frequently and spending most of his time in the field mapping, but also having responsibility for the final reports. Marie accompanied him in the field and learned about making careful observations and recording them accurately. Felt had no particular science background before this project, but has done a commendable job of presenting many of the essentials of marine geoscience. Her training as a writer and experience in newspaper writing serves well in making Soundings both reasonably accurate reportage and an engaging narrative. This is a story anyone interested in the modern history of geology should know – and I am pleased that Hali Felt chose to write it.
    • 4/5
      Soundings is a fascinating look at the life and accomplishments of Marie Tharp, whose intellect and hard work resulted in the first maps of Earth's ocean floors. Her maps caused a stir in the scientific community by supporting the revolutionary new theories of plate tectonics. As a woman in a field dominated by men, and during a time when women were not expected to hold jobs outside clerical and teaching fields, her accomplishments are even more astonishing and humbling. I was surprised to learn the maps I had taped to my walls in college were created by a woman I knew nothing about.The author presents a detailed biography of her subject and her admiration for Ms. Tharp is evident throughout the book. At times, the author's insertion of herself into the narrative, as well as her use of a contrived Mission Impossible scenario detracts from the story which drags in places. This is a dense read, however, the material and the subject matter prevail to present a very complete portrait of an under-rated, under appreciated brilliant female scientist who deserves acknowledgement for her life's work.
    • 5/5
      This is the latest in a number of long overdue books that recognize the women who, assisted in, shared in, or in many cases made, fundamental scientific discoveries. Marie Tharp devoted her life to the study of the ocean floor. A region that was less understood than the face of the moon. She took strings of data obtained from scores of observations by vessels of many nations and put them together into a map. The ability to see this data at a glance on a map changed geology forever. The current understanding of plate tectonics and continental drift comes directly from the study of her meticulous rendering of this data. Pull up Google maps and take a look at any see bed. This woman mapped 90% of what you are looking at. On top of that she until very recently – after her death by the way – got very little credit for it.This is a very good book. It tells in great detail the life of a brilliant woman and just what “following your dream” used to entail if you happened to be born female.I recommend this book very strongly to anyone who has an interest in science or the history of social change. A free copy of this book was provided for the purpose of review.
    • 4/5
      Interesting account of the life of Marie Tharp, a cartographer and geologist who first mapped the ocean floor, and showed the presence of the Mid-Atlantic rift, which helped prove continental drift. The biography accounts for her time at the Lamont Geological Observatory, and her long term relationship with Dr. Bruce Heezen. Maurice Ewing, the director of the Lamont Geological Observatory, is protrayed as a harrasing supervisor like someone out of a Dilbert cartoon.But the discoveries of Marie Tharp, which are often overlooked, and the credit for her discoveries are frequently attributed to the male scientists around her. This is also a good example about how small minded people, even in the sciences, can be cruel, jealous and bigoted.The book is a bit slow in parts, and the footnotes are mising, although a notes section is given at the end of the book. Also, there is no index, which would be helpful, especially for named persons.Recommended for people interested in the oceans, geology or cartography. Also for those interested in the biographies of women in science, and in the history of scientific ideas.I particularly find this book fascinating, since I have a copy of her map of the ocean floors mounted in my library. She was an original thinker and clever cartographer, and I had not known her story, although I had known her map, until I read this book. It neatly fits a crack in the wall of the history of science.

    Book preview

    Soundings - Hali Felt

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