Bruce Heezen

Bruce Charles Heezen (11 April 1924 to 21 June 1977) was an American geologist. Born in Vinton, Iowa, he grew up in Muscatine, took a B.A. at the University of Iowa in 1947, and earned his M.A. in 1952 and Ph.D. in 1957 at Columbia University. There he worked with the oceanographic cartographer Marie Tharp to map the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in the 1950s. Tharp, who drafted the seafloor profiles, found that her plot of the North Atlantic showed a rift valley, which Heezen first dismissed; they went on to show a mountain range with a central valley circling the globe, and that oceanic earthquakes fell within the rift. He first read their work as support for the Expanding Earth theory but gave that idea up for a form of continental drift in the mid-1960s. He received the Bigelow Medal in 1964, the Cullum Geographical Medal in 1973 and the Bucher Medal in 1977, and died of a heart attack on a research cruise near Iceland aboard the submarine NR-1. A survey ship, a canyon in the northwest Atlantic and an Antarctic glacier carry his name.