Harry Hess is a well-recognized person in the geology community for his discoveries supporting the theory of continental drift. He was the first person to discover that there was an under-sea mountain chain and he also proposed the theory of seafloor spreading. He made these findings while working on a boat in the Atlantic, he left the sounding equipment on so it would take measurements of the seafloor but what he found out was that the seafloor consisted of large mountains that had been flattened on the top. Dr. Hess published a book backing and explaining Alfred Wegner’s theory of continental drift and how it worked called History of Ocean Basins which also answered many unanswered questions in the geology community. Harry Hess was much more than just a geologist.

Harry Hess was born May 27, 1906 in New York City. He received a Bachelor of science from Yale in 1931 and his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1932. Upon graduation Hess taught 1 year at Rutgers University and spent a year as a research assistant at a geophysical laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. In 1934 he became a professor at Princeton. In 1950 he became head of the geology department at Princeton and in 1963 became the Sixth Blair of Geology. Dr. Hess died of a heart attack August 26, 1969 of a …show more content…
Dr. Hess studied while he was at sea, measuring the seafloor with sounding equipment and studying what he found. He wondered why there was so little sediment deposited at the bottom of the seafloor when the ocean is over 4 billion years old. He explained new crust was created at the great global rift and crust was getting pushed under the continental plate and magma rose up and created the new crust. The initial idea came from when he discovered there were mountains with flat tops under the ocean while aboard the ship USS Cape