Went to the British Library Map Room today to view Tharp's Physiographic diagram of the South Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea, the Scotia Sea, and the eastern margin of the South Pacific Ocean. It is always a thrilling moment when you are handed a carefully packaged document, that may not have been viewed for many years, from the BL’s collections . Even so spreading the map out on the table was a revelation, what emerged, fold by fold, was a richly detailed drawing of the seabed which I spent a good hour pouring over, as much for the sensual and aesthetic experience of doing so, than anything else. The drawings of seamounts, of which an estimated 30,000.00 cover the globe, resemble maps of Tolkein's Middle earth.

I have discovered that a number of Tharp maps are held in different libraries throughout the UK, including the V and A and the Maritime Museum, suggesting the possibility of a Tharp pilgrimage to view all of them. NOCS have one of the North Atlantic, which I shall investigate on my next trip there.

At coffee break someone mentions Marie Tharp describing her as an ‘artist who drew sections of the seabed’. Further research uncovers a cartographer and geologist, working in the fifties - a time when women were not allowed onto research vessels, who with a pen, ruler and data collected by her colleague, oceanographer Bruce Heezen, plotted the Mid-Oceanic Ridge, a line of undersea mountains that run along the sea bed between Europe/Africa and the Americas. An undertaking that laid the foundations for theories of plate tectonics and continental drift which were controversial until well into the 1960’s.

‘She wondered whether the depression was evidence of a continuous rift - a crack in the world - down the middle of the ridge. And … in turn whether that rift might be evidence of what scientists now call seafloor spreading, popularly known as continental drift. She and Mr. Heezen argued about it. She threw erasers and bottles of ink at him. It took him some time to come around. “I discounted it as girl talk and didn’t believe it for a year”

Many of the tributes to Tharp, who died in 2006, emphasize her fiery nature and powerful intuition observations which charecterise her achievements in a way that it is hard to imagine happening to a man, the later offering never the less a point of reference for my own less than rational approach.

Surfing - a term that in this context takes on a new meaning - the net last night, in search of images which reveal a popular sense of the sub maritime, I came across a collection of photographs taken by Bruce Mozert in the 1930's of underwater tableaux. Searching more widely the predominance of images of women in underwater settings is striking revealing perhaps, in the fantastic character of these exotic projections, a deep sense of association between the feminine and the fluid along with a desire to colonise and domestic such spaces. The later being evident too in the number of underwater restaurants, shops and hotels that exist worldwide.