Kindle Notes & Highlights
Marie eventually inherited this collection, just as she inherited her father’s acuity for what he called “reading nature.”
Later, when she wakes up, the sun has set and the light in the car is violet and jade. Her mouth is dry as cotton and she lets her face fall toward the window. And there they are, behind her: not mountains, not really, just some fog-shrouded cardboard cutouts retreating in the distance. “One of the most colossal disappointments in my whole life,” she called them, more than fifty years later. “Not a goddamn mountain in sight.”
How I feel about the Ozarks, or
the Oauchitas.
“They wanted,” Marie said, “to use dating to establish that the Earth was created in 4004 B.C.” This was a creationist approach to the history of the Earth, and it was an anomaly in the field of geology. Ever since the nineteenth century, even the most conservative estimates had been placing the Earth’s age at twenty million years. “We called them theochemists,” Marie said.
Gentlemen, Cousteau says again, and when he continues everyone knows he’s about to talk about the rift. No one looks at Marie. I did not believe, he says, his eyes sweeping the audience. I did not believe that the map of the North Atlantic recently published by Lamont could possibly be right. I did not believe that the Mid-Atlantic Rift pictured on it could possibly be continuous. Too complete a story, I thought, from too little information. But it is there, Cousteau says. His eyes find Marie’s. It is true, he says.
Today Hess is considered one of the founders of plate tectonics; he gets whole chapters in history books that often also feature Doc and Bruce in starring roles. Marie usually gets a sentence of credit alongside her map. Sometimes she gets a page or two of recognition for her work in revealing the ocean floor or appears to narrate Bruce’s legacy, but it stops there: her maps left disconnected from the seminal papers that transformed plate tectonics from a hypothesis to a theory.
