The Violinist Who Solved the Ancient Riddle of How the World Holds It Together – The Marginalian
This story is adapted from Traversal.
He looked at the staff lines of the strange blue symphony, his guarded disbelief fueled by a burst of awe-inspiring surprise. Brushes and tubes of paint are strewn about him — the paint he has spent years mixing with shades of blue to color the world's treasured depths between his giant maps as he works. But now he is not looking at the pants. He doesn't look at maps. He looked at the staff lines. Except that they are lines of work only for him, a violinist since childhood. To any other geologist, to his colleagues at the Lamont Geological Observatory on the banks of the Hudson River, to carbon-dating rock samples trying to prove that the Earth was created in 4004 BCE, this object of disbelief and wonder is a common fathogram that plots the rotation of a thousand ocelyfam thin horizon lines. depth increase – data output of the fathometer, a sounding instrument pioneered in 1490 when Leonardo da Vinci sank a tube into open water to measure the distance of ships, and was perfected centuries later in the sonar technology used to detect enemy submarines during the first world war. Four hundred years after Magellan made the first sounding of one place by dropping a weighted line into the blue waters of the Pacific and declared that the sea was empty when the line reached 410 fathoms, the invention of the fathometer in the early 1920s, its ability to measure depths as great as 3,000 variables of the surface of the earth above the surface of the earth above the surface of the human world. more mysterious than the Moon. “It would be an unfathomable universe,” Whitman enthused Leaves of Grassapplying the same thought of joy to the mysterious universe that dwells here on Earth, in what he respected as “the world under the sea.”
A century after Whitman, and only one percent of that world has been studied in detail, three quarters of the planet appears on any map as a blue background similar to its featureless terrestrial surface, where the bottom of the world is thought to be in a large bathtub, this violinist trained in spherical trigonometry hears something that has never happened before. a view of how this rocky blue planet holds together as Earth. Singing under it is the answer to the ancient mystery of how a mountain earthquake can destroy a city, a life, a world.
He pulled out nearly a kilometer of paper from a corner of his office – fathograms from his boss and his graduate students on several Atlantic voyages over five years, none of which he, or any of them, was allowed to join. He put together a composite picture of the sea from incomplete details heard from various ship routes, engraved on blue linen paper with a crow pen and India ink. He pasted together strips of this green linen paper on a large sheet spread across several writing tables, magnified to a double degree of exaggeration to make the subtleties of the data legible; one of those subtle things can be the spark of change. On this enormous sheet, he devised a technique to measure various depths – underwater peaks and troughs, smooth slopes and sudden dips. Mark each depth as a dot on the graph. A note to staff. The dots are one inch apart, to be connected to the music of the description.
And it is in that nothingness of data, in that inch of silence, that the logic of integration reaches its limit and the logic of integration begins, seeking the beauty of translation.
He filled in the blanks with dotted ideas, rhyming songs that included notes. And now, with the strange result in front of him, skeptical as a scientist, optimistic as a hymnodist, he learns by seeing the record of the largest feature of the world – undiscovered and unbelievable, singing there in the data without counterpoint: the rift valley at the bottom of the ocean, which extends for forty thousand continuous miles around the lines of the world that cannot believe in what the globetour says. the planet is true.
He's about to paint that transition line a fiery red on his blue. A tectonic record of the fine shale that divides the Earth's solar plexus.
The year is 1952. Marie Tharp is thirty-two years old. One of the few ocean cartographers in the world, he has spent four years at sea documenting, mapping and redrawing a large part of the world, assembling a collection of dynamic data – data that can confirm the highly controversial idea that the Earth is not a static planet but a dynamic, ever-changing world; that the continental drift – theory fringe that the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener had given half a century before and paid with his reputation, his life – is true.
Half a century later, in the last years of her life, Marie Tharpe would look back on her discoveries in a wider area with the same startled disbelief:
Not many people can say this about their lives: The whole world is spread out before me (or at least, 70 percent of it is covered by oceans). I had a blank canvas to fill with possibilities, an interesting jigsaw puzzle to put together: mapping the hidden world underground. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—for anyone, but especially for a woman in the 1950s. The nature of the times, the state of science, and events large and small, rational and irrational, combine to make everything possible.
Marie grew up with dirty hair and covered in mud, wheeling on dirt roads, collecting snake bones, looking for arrows that she placed like stone butterflies, being kicked out of school for wearing pants, riding through the mud and sun-scorched forests of the American Midwest 20 teaching her father a green truck 19 when she was eleven – her father, a publicly paid soil surveyor and a poet outside the public, whom she loved and adored. He later joked that he took her on that trip specifically to use her as a living metric, photographing the little girl next to various large geologic features he wished to enlarge.
Under the requirements of geology, the nation of three was constantly moving—Indiana, Alabama, Ohio, DC, more than a dozen small migrations before Marie graduated as a teenager, indifferent to the life of eternal nomads. When his father had saved enough money, he bought a farm in Ohio to organize and settle a wandering band. Within a year, his mother had died. Her mother had died, and all Marie could do was play the violin. He played it in college, he became a member of the college symphony orchestra, in a program of life that would be completely redone. But it didn't leave him, music, even after he became obsessed with geology, which he persisted in but still completed his majors in music and English, and four children in all visual arts. And now – a degree in geology and a second baccalaureate in mathematics later – you look at the fathometer lines and see the symphony of the Earth.
The model of plate tectonics that would emerge from his discovery would change our understanding of life itself: Tectonic activity combines surface and ocean chemistry, recycled materials to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature stable, and is what allowed the Earth's water to remain liquid over the billions of years that complex life needed to evolve. Without it, we would not rise from the sea to level the universe and fill the world with music.
The story of Marie Thrape's life and discovery – joined by Alfred Wegener, Walt Whitman, Mary Shelley, Frederick Douglass, and other visionaries who changed our understanding of what makes a planet earth and what makes a story a mind that knows music and math, justice and love – lives on Traversalcover showing his dynamic map of the ocean floor.
