Page 32 - i1052-5173-27-6

Marie Tharp—Plate Tectonics Pioneer
Hali Felt, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487, USA
Marie Tharp during her college days. Image
courtesy Hali Felt.
YOUTH
Marie Tharp was born in 1920 in Ypsilanti, Michigan, USA,
to William Edgar Tharp and Bertha Louise Newton. William
worked in a plant nursery until the U.S. Department of
Agriculture’s Bureau of Soils hired him in 1904. Bertha had been
a high school German teacher before, as Tharp says her father
always used to remark, she “traded one job for another.” She died
when Tharp was 15. As parents, William and Bertha seem to have
been past an age (50 and 40, respectively, when Tharp was born)
where coddling their only child was an option. They were devoted,
but they trusted her to find her own way and let her explore the
unknown so she’d gain confidence. This proved handy, as
William’s job required them to move nearly every season, follow-
ing soft soil: winters spent in the south, summers spent in the
north. They spent every four years in Washington, D.C., so
William could go to the Soil Bureau’s main office to oversee the
printing of the maps he had worked on since his last visit.
For most of her early life, Marie Tharp did not display much
interest in science as a formal pursuit, but she loved going into the men were off fighting in WWII, it was understood that most of
field with her father. As a small child, she would sit in the back of the students would be women. When Tharp asked Dow, he told
her father’s truck “making mudpies and generally being a
32 GSA Today | June 2017
nuisance.” She loved to tell one particular story about trekking out
into the Midwestern countryside with her father, who on this
occasion had his camera and took a photograph of Tharp pointing
to a tumor on a tree. Her father’s itinerant job meant that Marie
attended more than a dozen schools before graduating from high
school, of which her full school year in Florence, Alabama, USA,
was influential. In Florence, she took school field trips on weekends
to study trees and rocks, and collected a big bag of snake skeletons
and skins and took them home, terrifying her mother. Florence was
also where she had a class called Current Science, in which she and
her classmates learned all about what contemporary scientists were
working on, which she loved, but it had an optimistic tone that dis-
couraged her from thinking that there was anything left to discover.
EDUCATION
Science as a discipline to be studied eluded Tharp until college.
She entered Ohio University in the fall of 1939, started out an art
major, then took music, German, zoology, paleobotany, philoso-
phy, and English classes before discovering her love of geology.
A semester after her introduction to geology she took physical
geology and met the “nearest to a mentor I ever saw.” His name
was Dr. Dow, and his office door was always open; he must have
recognized a blossoming talent when he saw it. He was the one
who suggested that Tharp take drafting, a skill not usually neces-
sary to become a geologist, but one which he knew would improve
her chances of getting a job in a discipline dominated by men and
old traditions: If she could draft, she might be able to work in an
office. She got a C in the class (of 73 students, only three were
women), but said that she learned a lot. “It was very important to
learn the tools, and it was a beginning of learning to see things in
three dimensions.”
As a senior, Tharp saw a flyer hanging on the bulletin board
outside of Dow’s office. The University of Michigan, it said, was
offering an accelerated geology degree with the guarantee of a job
in the petroleum industry upon graduation. Because most of the
her to try it: “It only takes two years,” she remembered him telling
her, “you don’t like it, you can do something else.” By the begin-
ning of 1943, she was enrolled in the University of Michigan’s
petroleum geology program, one of a group of women called the
“PG [Petroleum Geology] Girls.”
It was a confusing time to be training as a geologist. Alfred
Wegener had published The Origins of the Continents and Oceans
28 years prior, but his ideas had been largely dismissed, and there
was still no definitive theory that explained how Earth’s crust
formed. Mountains, oceans, continents, islands, valleys—even
Earth’s simplest features were still a source of contention. One