Background
Heezen was born in Vinton, Iowa.
Heezen was born in Vinton, Iowa.
An only child, he moved at age six with his parents to Muscatine, Iowa, where he graduated from high school in 1942.
He worked with oceanographic cartographer Marie Tharp at Columbia University to map the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in the 1950s. He received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Iowa in 1947. He received his Master of Arts in 1952 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1957 from Columbia University.
Heezen collaborated extensively with cartographer Marie Tharp.
He interpreted their joint work on the Mid-Atlantic ridge as supporting South. Warren Carey"s Expanding Earth Theory, developed in the 1950s, but under Tharp"s influence "eventually gave up the idea of an expanding earth for a form of continental drift in the mid-1960s."
Heezen died of a heart attack in 1977 while on a research cruise to study the Mid-Atlantic Ridge near Iceland aboard the NR-1 submarine. The Oceanographic Survey Ship USNS Bruce C. Heezen was christened in honor of him in 1999.