Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor. By Hali Felt

SOUNDINGS: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor. By Hali Felt. 340 pp.: maps, ills., notes, index. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2012. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780805092158. In the early 20th century, the German polar meteorologist Alfred Wegener used fossil and glacial deposits to postulate the prior existence of a large super-continent (Pangea), which then proceeded to split into pieces over geological time. His theory of continental drift was extremely controversial and rejected by most geologists, primarily because he was not able to provide a physical mechanism for his theory; he could not explain what was happening beneath the Earth's surface to cause these huge land masses to move about. That mechanism was found in the latter half of the century, ironically in the oceans. By this time, the technology behind SONAR, marine gravity and marine magnetics had advanced to the point that the complexities of the ocean floor and beneath could be unraveled in unprecedented detail. And it took a young woman with a background and training unusual for the time in both geology and mathematics, coupled with art, to have the courage of her convictions and her intellect to posit one of the most fundamental proofs of continental drift: a rift valley caused by the faulting of seafloor spreading. But because she was a woman, her contributions were belittled or outright ignored. The biographies of Rosalind Franklin and Mileva Marie Einstein may come to mind. Franklin was the chemist whose research was instrumental in Watson and Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA, but she was largely unheralded and forgotten. Einstein was little more than a footnote in her husband's biographical story until a 1987 release of his private letters revealed that she was a brilliant and ambitious physicist in her own right. Soundings, by Hali Felt, is yet another account of an amazing female scientist, initially not allowed to function as a scientist, and then once finally allowed to do so, was not given proper recognition for her accomplishments until decades later. The account is extremely well written, well researched, and thus compelling, engaging, celebratory, and, most importantly, instructive. Interestingly enough, at the beginning of the book Felt interweaves her own story alongside the narrative of Tharp's. This could have been quite distracting, but for this reviewer lent a level of personalism and authenticity that was attractive, drawing me even further into the Tharp narrative. Indeed, it is remarkable that Felt had never met Tharp, and did not start her work on this book in earnest until after Tharp's death in 2006. Tharp had no immediate family left when she passed, only her faithful research assistants, affectionately dubbed "Tharpophiles." Yet Felt recreated scenes from her life as if there as a witness, often describing in great and intimate detail what Tharp might have been thinking at many critical junctures. I normally do not pay much attention to the notes section of a book. But this is a work where I would highly recommend a close study of the notes available for each chapter. It is within these pages that Felt very carefully documents her sources, including how and why she felt justified in "interpolating" Tharp's life and thoughts. As a seagoing mapper of the ocean floor who started working professionally just as Tharp was finally being recognized for her great scientific accomplishments, the pages of Soundings rang very true for this reviewer. Part one consists of seven chapters chronicling Tharp's early years, noting that "on one level, for most of the first twenty years of her life, Marie did not publicly display much interest in science. But on another level, it seems that she was, throughout her childhood and adolescence, quietly gathering bits of scientific knowledge like gossip, trying to deduce whether her private crush might be worthy of pursuit (p. 27)." Inspired by many treks into the field with her father, who was a professional soil surveyor for the government, and nourished by very close relationships with both parents, Tharp went on from Ohio University to an accelerated master degree program at the University of Michigan (encouragingly open to women at the time with, so many men off to war in the early 1940s). …