How One Brilliant Woman Mapped the Secrets of the Ocean Floor | Short Film Showcase

19:12. A German meteorologist named Alfred Wegener proposed the theory about how the Earth's landmasses formed. He suggested that the great continents of the Earth had once formed a single landmass called Pangaea, which had broken up and drifted apart over time. He called this process continental drift, and it went against all conventional thinking at the time. It may seem very unpopular amongst his peers; it's a shame because he was absolutely right.

But it would take the work of a young cartographer called Maurice Art to help turn the tide of opposition, leading to one of the greatest paradigm shifts in the Earth sciences, and it all began at the bottom of the ocean. Mary Father worked for the Department of Agriculture, and from a young age, she joined him on his work trips. He traveled around the country collecting samples for soil survey.

These early experiences were formative in developing Mary's interest in geology, and after gaining a master's degree in the subject, she landed a position at Columbia University in 1947. Here, she worked as an assistant to Bruce Heezen, a geology graduate who was collecting thousands of depth measurements across the Atlantic Ocean during expeditions. He and his team used echo soundings to collect depth data, which involves sending out high-frequency sounds, or pings, and recording the time delay of the returning echoes.

The data could then be plotted to build a profile of the terrain below. Unfortunately for thought, women were prohibited from joining these early expeditions because of a fear that they'd bring bad luck at sea. Instead, she remained behind at the university to process the data, converting endless rows of X measurements into detailed profiles of the ocean floor. Conventional thinking once believed that the ocean floors were flat, featureless plains, but charts were beginning to tell an entirely different story.

Her profiles revealed the existence of complex geography of crevices and metallic structures, but perhaps most startling was the emergence of a long v-shaped cleft that ran through each of her profiles. These so-called rift valleys offered support to Wegener's continental drift theory; if two landmasses were moving apart, they'd split the ocean floor in two, carrying the scar in the landscape and forming a valley below.

With this evidence for the controversial theory, Sark believed so, but Seasons was skeptical, dismissing many of her suggestions as "girl talk." Nevertheless, Sark was convinced by her findings and later produced a more detailed physiographic map to further support her case. At the same time, another graduate student, Howard Foster, was plotting the epicenters of earthquakes in the same region of the Atlantic.

Foster noticed that they occurred at the same location as her proposed valleys, and as he expanded to other areas, they found something interesting: where there were mid-ocean ridges, there were also earthquakes. So it seemed as though these two were related. At this point, even the skeptical Heezen could no longer deny what they were looking at—a pattern of scars that spanned the Earth's oceans, permanent wounds torn into existence through the process of continental drift.

The findings were finally reported in 1957, but opposition from the scientific community was still fierce. Renowned explorer Jacques Cousteau was so sure they were wrong, he charted an expedition to film the ocean floor to settle the score once and for all. But the footage he brought back did the opposite; it showed the deep valleys. It showed how it splits the mid-Atlantic Ridge in half, and it showed that Dart's maps were right all along.

It was exactly where she plotted it, and the evidence mounted. The paradigm shift in the Earth sciences was inevitable. Such steadfast determination has paved the way for Wegener's continental drift theory to gain traction, and as the tide of opposition waned, it gave birth to our modern understanding of plate tectonics and cemented Dart's position as one of the most outstanding cartographers of the 20th century.

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