Discovery
A ridge under the Atlantic Ocean was first inferred by Matthew Fontaine Maury in 1850. The ridge was discovered during the expedition of HMS Challenger in 1872. A team of scientists on board, led by Charles Wyville Thomson, discovered a large rise in the middle of the Atlantic while investigating the future location for a transatlantic telegraph cable. The existence of such a ridge was confirmed by sonar in 1925 and was found to extend around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean by the German Meteor expedition.
In the 1950s, mapping of the Earth’s ocean floors by Bruce Heezen, Maurice Ewing, Marie Tharp and others revealed the Mid-Atlantic Ridge to have a strange bathymetry of valleys and ridges, with its central valley being seismologically active and the epicentre of many earthquakes. Ewing and Heezen discovered the ridge to be part of a 40,000-km-long essentially continuous system of mid-ocean ridges on the floors of all the Earth’s oceans. The discovery of this worldwide ridge system led to the theory of seafloor spreading and general acceptance of Wegener's theory of continental drift and expansion as plate tectonics.
Read more about this topic: Mid-Atlantic Ridge
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“That the discovery of this great truth, which lies so near and obvious to the mind, should be attained to by the reason of so very few, is a sad instance of the stupidity and inattention of men, who, though they are surrounded with such clear manifestations of the Deity, are yet so little affected by them, that they seem as it were blinded with excess of light.”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)
“He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The gain is not the having of children; it is the discovery of love and how to be loving.”
—Polly Berrien Berends (20th century)