Bruce c heezen biography sample

The Community Foundation of Greater Muscatine has opened application for the Muscatine High School scholarships, including the Bruce C. Heezen Memorial Scholarship to qualifying college-bound students pursuing any field of study. The scholarship is named for one of history’s foremost oceanographers and a former Muscatine resident. 

Bruce C. Heezen’s interests and studies took him from the Midwest to the mid-Atlantic Ocean floor. This former Muscatine resident shaped the discussion about what shapes the earth’s crust, and he created maps of the ocean floor that are still used today.

Bruce Heezen was a scholar and a scientist that catapulted geographical study forward.  The multi-disciplinary impact of his findings knows no bounds.  Mr. Heezen’s example serves as a beacon of inspiration for all students.  Although Heezen had very specialized knowledge, a scholarship that bears his name supports college students in any course of study.

Heezen was born in Vinton, Iowa, in 1924, and moved to Muscatine at age 6. He attended Lincoln School through eighth grade and graduated from Muscatine High School in 1942. An only child, he worked on the family turkey farm before going to the University of Iowa, where he studied geology. He graduated in 1948.

That same year, he became a Roberts Fellow at Columbia University in New York City where he earned his Master of Science degree in 1952 and his doctorate in 1957. He worked in association with the university’s Lamont-Doherty Observatory throughout his career.

Although he led ocean-floor mapping expeditions all over the world, Heezen most closely studied the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which is part of the longest mountain range in the world and separates the North Atlantic (tectonic) Plate from the Eurasian Plate. In the 1950s, the appearance of vast gaps and overlaps in the earth’s crust persuaded him to support the then-popular expanding earth theory. In

The Des Moines Register described Bruce Heezen as a large man. This, they said, contributed to his early death at age 53, on this day in 1977. But when we look at photographs of Bruce Heezen, he doesn’t appear to loom so large. Husky, they called that shape back in the 1970s. Normal, we call it today. We will get to his untimely death and its unusual circumstance in a few moments.

The native Iowan – a farm boy who grew up raising turkeys – played an important role in plate tectonics theory. But it is not clear that he accepted the idea himself. Heezen was an expansionist.He believed the Earth is getting larger day-by-day. There is so much about Bruce Heezen that simply does not fit. His hot temper led him to bellow and to knock over waste-bins. But he earned the intellectual respect of all his peers. He dismissed co-worker geologist Marie Tharp’s discovery of the mid-ocean rifts as “girl talk” yet he defended and supported her and bequeathed his home and all his property to her. He grew up feeding turkeys on a prairie farm; he died in a submarine a thousand metres below the sea’s surface.

Here are some passages from the book, The Mountain Mystery:

Beginning in the late 1940s, Maurice Ewing [a seismic expert and director of an oceanography lab] and Bruce Heezen tried to work together using seismic and sonar to map the seafloor. At first, they collaborated brilliantly. Ewing had discovered Heezen in Iowa, where Bruce Heezen was an undergraduate geology student. Ewing offered the young man a job alongside him aboard the Atlantis, collecting sea-depth profiles. Instead, when twenty-year-old Bruce Heezen arrived on the east coast, Ewing assigned him the role of chief scientist aboard a different ship. Heezen, not yet a senior at his college, was in charge of a research ship and its data collection. At the end of the summer, he was back in Iowa where he finished his degree, then head

On April 11, 1924, oceanographer and marine geologist, Bruce Charles Heezen was born.

He became an expert on continental drift and the undersea landslides that reshape ocean floors. A pioneer in plate tectonics, he was leader of the team from Columbia University that discovered and mapped the Mid-Atlantic Ridge during the 1950s. His efforts led to the discovery of a global system of sub-sea volcanoes. Heezen’s co-discoverer, oceanographic cartographer Marie Tharp, plotted and completed the groundbreaking Heezen-Tharp map of the entire ocean floor.

Heezen received the Henry Bryant Bigelow Medal from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Walter Bucher Award from the American Geophysical Union. The USNS oceanographic survey ship Bruce C. Heezen is named after him.

B Bondar / Real World Content Advantage