Soundings

Finished April 13

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

This biography of Marie Tharp, geologist and gifted draftsperson, follows her entire life but really focuses on her work bringing the ocean floor to life with the maps she made. She was a scientist with the academic degrees to show for it, but she was also a woman in a time where women scientists weren't respected in the same way as men scientists. After working for a few years she found her way to position at the relatively new geophysical lab at Columbia University, where she interpreted the soundings, or sonar pings, that were brought back from oceangoing expeditions. 

Marie combined art and science to create maps of the ocean floor, beginning with the North Atlantic. These maps were crucial to proving the then-controversial theory of continental drift. Her maps showed a landscape of mountain ranges, ridges, rifts, and valleys that also showed the history of our planet. Her partner in this work was Bruce Heezen, another scientist who spent much of his professional life on these oceangoing expeditions collecting the soundings. 

This book covers the entirety of her professional work, through internal department fighting, through the change to her and her team working at her own home, and the aftermath of that.

It also gives glimpses into her personal life, her relationships with her father, her brother, and with Bruce, her life partner as well as professional partner. But the personal side is only glimpsed at. I didn't get a good sense of the woman herself, perhaps because the author never met her in person and worked from what she could find as her friends and co-workers cleared out her home and what she found in archives.

This book has been sitting on my shelf for more than ten years, a birthday gift from years ago that I'd read a review for and that intrigued me. As a child I was fascinated by the National Geographic mpas of the ocean floor and I still own some. Knowing that she was behind their creation added to how I feel about them. An interesting read. 

A Mapmaker's Dream

Finished October 15

A Mapmaker's Dream: The Meditations of Fra Mauro, Cartographer to the Court of Venice: a novel by James Cowan

This book is a fictionalized tale of a real man. Fra Mauro was a monk at San Michele di Murano who lived in the first half of the 15th century and created the most detailed and accurate map of the world for his time. 

The Fra Mauro of this book lives in the sixteenth century and so is familiar with some of the men who sailed widely and discovered new lands and routes of the time. This book is written as a collection of meditations of that man, talking about the men who've visited him and the types of information that they've shared. Some of them have shared geographic information, but others share philosophical and spiritual experiences, causing him to also have deeper thoughts on these subjects. So this is also a novel of self-reflection. The introduction says that the author came across these writings when doing research on someone else, and was first distracted and then enraptured by these and translated them into English. But as you may note from the cover this is a novel, so there is uncertainty about what is real and what isn't, besides the change of when the narrator lived.