The history of cartography is littered with such pseudo-continents, chimerical islands, dream-rivers and other Wilkean visions, flickering between the literal and the mythical. cartographers have often tended also to be dreamers, seduced into their science by the beauty of maps and the flights of imagination that they prompt.
~ Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind
Imagine now the flight of the imagination that took place when geologist and cartographer Marie Tharp connected the pattern of canyons, ridges, and mountains she was mapping, along with the pattern of earthquakes in those regions, to the burgeoning theory of plate tectonics and seafloor spreading. A single map can change the world.
“Not too many people can say this about their lives: The whole world was spread out before me (or at least, the seventy percent of it covered by oceans). I had a blank canvas to fill with extraordinary possibilities, a fascinating jigsaw puzzle to piece together: mapping the world’s vast hidden seafloor. It was a once-in-a-lifetime—a once-in-the-history-of-the-world—opportunity for anyone, but especially for a woman in the 1940s. The nature of the times, the state of the science, and events large and small, logical and illogical, combined to make it all happen.”