ABSTRACT
The physical process of surveying the sea's depth is not comparable to that of surveying land or coastlines. The physical nature of sounding the deep sea remains an enterprise rife with physical and technical difficulties. During the nineteenth century, the sounding of the oceanic depths became part of a wider, global project of making sense of the earth's physical geography as a whole. Based on a limited number of soundings in the North Atlantic, Maury deduced and mapped, in 1855, the existence of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge will thus be located within a more general fathoming of the deep ocean and within the wider context of making sense of the earth as a single, geological entity. In 1915, Arthur Wegener published The Origin of Continents and Oceans, a seminal book that outlined the theory of continental drift. Producing knowledge about the deep sea and the seabed was a complex, multilayered enterprise.
