Harry Hess Research Paper

Harry Hess was born on May 27, 1906 in New York city. Over the course of his career, He was elected to several prestigious groups including the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and the geological studies of London, South Africa, and Venezuela. Hess was the first geologist from Western hemisphere to receive the Feltrinelli prize from the latter group. Hess became a professor at Princeton University, where He became the head of Geology Department in 1950 and in 1969 the sixth Blair professor of geology. Hess lived in New York City but traveled almost everywhere to different universities. Hess died by a heart attack on August 26, 1969 in Massachusetts. According to Hess, he failed his first class in mineralogy

Cape Johnson. Hess discovered features on the floor of the ocean that appeared to be mountains with the tops flattened on the seafloor. He called these features guyots after the first Geology professor at Princeton. Hess explained that the new crust was created at the Great Global Rift and was pushed under the continental crust about 300 million years later where it would melt and turn into magma. Hess theorized that these were once volcanic mountains that were moved and eroded over time. In 1962, President Kennedy appointed Hess to chair the Space Science Board, which advised NASA. Hess held position until his death in 1969 and played a key role in the planning of the Apollo moon landings. One month prior to his death, Hess helped analyze lunar rock samples from the Apollo 11 mission. Another important contribution that Hess made to science was the organization and direction of the Princeton Caribbean Research Project. The project continues to explore the geology of the Caribbean region and has been the focus of several doctoral

By 1937 he had developed a unifying hypothesis that tied together the creation of island arcs with the presence of gravity anomalies and magnetic bets of serpentine. Hess’s geological research was halted during WW2 because he was a reserve officer in the Navy. He was initially assigned to duty in New York City, where he was responsible for estimating the positions of enemy submarines in the North Atlantic. Hess was then assigned to active sea duty and eventually became commander of an attack transport ship. This vessel carried equipment for sounding the ocean floor, Hess took full advantage of it. He mapped a large part of the Pacific Ocean, discovering in the process the underwater flat-topped seamounts that he named guyots, in honor of A.H. Guyot, the first professor of geology at Princeton. As commander of the USS Cape Johnson, Hess also participated in four major combat landings. After the war ended, He continued to study guyots as well as mid-ocean ridges, which ran down the centers of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans like an underwater backbone. He also continued his mineralogical studies on the family of pyroxenes, an important group of rock-forming minerals. In 1955, he proposed that the boundary between the crust and the mantle of the earth is due to a change in the chemical composition of rocks. Today