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Google Doodle honours the life of Marie Tharp

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Today’s Google Doodle honours the life of Marie Tharp, an American geologist and oceanographic cartographer who helped prove continental drift theories. She collaborated on the first global map of ocean floors. On this day in 1998, the Library of Congress named Tharp one of the 20th century’s greatest cartographers.
Today, Marie Tharp is remembered as the revolutionary she was.
When Marie Tharp started working at the Lamont Geological Laboratory in 1948, very little was known about the structure of the seafloor. Her maps gradually revealed the existence of the mid-ocean ridges, a network of mountain ranges that stretches over 40,000 miles around the world. Tharp and Heezen published the first complete world map of ocean floors in 1977.
“I had a blank canvas to fill with extraordinary possibilities, a fascinating jigsaw puzzle to piece together,” says Marie Tharp in Google doodle. It was a once-in-a-lifetime – once-in-world-history opportunity for anyone, but especially for a woman in the 1940s.” Nothing could have better summed up her life, zeal, and the magnitude of her contribution.

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