Marie Tharp ocean floor map : For much of the mid-20th century, many American scientists rejected continental drift, the controversial idea that Earth's continents were not fixed in place. Marie Tharp's seafloor maps, culminating in a world map completed in 1977, helped tilt scientific opinion toward acceptance of continental drift and clear a path for the emerging theory of plate tectonics, as per a report.
Created by geologist and cartographer Marie Tharp, geologist Bruce Heezen and Austrian painter Heinrich Berann, the map gave scientists and the public their first glimpse of what the world's ocean floor looks like. It marked the culmination of more than three decades of Tharp's work at Columbia University.
