flora and flying - You cannot make this stuff up

Map of the world, from the bottom up. Courtesy of Lamont-Doherty.

On Saturday morning, we opened the New York times to see that Marie Tharp had died. Marie Tharp was one of the first female cartographers to map the seafloor. Outside my office is the map of the world ocean floor complied by Marie and her co-investigator Bruce Heezen. Marie was an innovator, a female who definitely forged her own path and one that was not easy by any means. I ran across a oral history she did for WHOI when I was helping TH at the archives. She was an amazing woman. Mapping is so much easier now, satellites, multibeam, huge databases and cooperative work makes it easier to integrate data. Women,though still in the minority in the ocean and atmopheric sciences, are still breaking ground.

I can't say it better than the folks at Lamont-Doherty. Here is their remembrance.