Marie Tharp

Hello! My name is Marie Tharp. When I was a little girl, my dad worked with maps of the land. We would travel all over, and I loved seeing all the different hills and valleys. I would look at the ground and wonder, what does the world look like under all the deep, deep water in the ocean?

When I grew up, I got a special job drawing pictures of the ocean floor. No one had ever seen a map of the whole thing before! It was like being a detective. My friend Bruce Heezen would go on big ships and use a special machine to collect numbers about how deep the water was. He would send me the numbers, and I would use them to draw what I thought the bottom of the ocean looked like. It was a giant puzzle! One day, as I was drawing, I discovered something amazing: a huge mountain range, hidden deep under the water! It stretched across the ocean like a long, bumpy zipper, with a big valley right down the middle.

After lots of drawing, Bruce and I put all the pieces together to make the first-ever map of the entire ocean floor. For the very first time, people could see the secret world of mountains and valleys hidden beneath the waves. My work helped everyone understand how our planet works. I lived to be 86 years old, and I am so happy people remember me as the person who drew the amazing world under the sea. My maps help scientists keep exploring our wonderful planet even today.