Seafloor topography

All of us — as students of soils and collaborators with soils — are deeply rooted in place. We are often quite literally in the ground, focused on the complex minerals and organisms that are soils. When we are above ground, we read botanical, hydrologic and human landscapes, mapping our observations with color and line. In a way, we are also muddy cartographers.

With seventy-one percent of the earth’s surface covered in water, soils’ relationships with water are countless and supreme. And so when I recently came across this charmingly illustrated animation from the Royal Institute chronicling the paradigm shift in European-American Earth Science — the acceptance of continental drift hypothesis and eventual move towards plate tectonics — I was delighted to see that its genesis was a bit of an homage to soils.

The animation is a speedy bio of Marie Tharp who co-created the first scientific map of the Atlantic Ocean floor. Her decades of work helped to reveal the detailed topography and multi-dimensional geographical landscape of the ocean bottom.

As the narrator, physicist and oceanographer Helen Czerski explains, Marie Tharp’s father worked for the US Department of Agriculture and from a young age, she’d join her father on his work trips “as he travelled around the country collecting samples for soil survey maps. These early experiences were formative in developing Marie’s interest in geology…” and onward, why not, to the formation and break-up of continents.