“At a time in which there was so much that needed to be done in America, he rolled up his sleeves and stepped in and made an enormous difference. He led a life of extraordinary consequence,” said Mr. Moore, who said he is planning to run for his relative’s congressional seat.
The eponymous oceanographer, Ms. Tharp, was pioneering in her field, creating the first scientific maps of the Atlantic Ocean’s floor and helping to shape the U.S. military’s understanding of plate tectonics and continental drift, with some of her research funded by the Navy.
Born in 1920, Ms. Tharp took advantage of a change in university admissions allowing women to enroll during World War II to receive an education that until then had been restricted to men. Ms. Tharp and a colleague studied sonar data taken from the research vessel of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Atlantis, to create highly detailed seafloor profiles and maps.
Ms. Tharp noticed a cleft in the ocean floor that she hypothesized to be a rift valley that ran along the ridge crest and continued along the length of its axis, which she posited (and was later proven) to be evidence of continental drift.
“I had a blank canvas to fill with extraordinary possibilities, a fascinating jigsaw puzzle to piece together: mapping the world’s vast hidden seafloor,” Ms. Tharp wrote in a book about the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, where she once worked. “It was a once-in-the-history-of-the-world opportunity for anyone, but especially for a woman in the 1940s.”
The significance of her contributions would become evident as research in her field continued over the decades, others said.
“For most of her working career, her contributions weren’t really celebrated. Her intellectual contributions were discounted,” Maureen Raymo, dean of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said, even though her “evidence of sea floor spreading was probably the biggest scientific revolution of the 20th century, certainly in earth sciences.”
