Cores recovered sand from depths of roughly 2 miles on or near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge

William Maurice “Doc” Ewing (1906–1974) was an American geophysicist and oceanographer, born in Texas. He led more than 50 oceanic expeditions. His work changed the picture of the seafloor from a still, featureless plain to an active, changing landscape.

His research helped lay the groundwork for plate tectonics, and the institution and methods he built are still in use.

Ewing joined careful physics with constant fieldwork at sea. He developed or improved key instruments (echo sounders, piston corers, seismic arrays, deep-sea cameras, gravimeters and towed magnetometers), collected huge amounts of data and worked with colleagues who made major discoveries. Under him, oceanography moved from short, occasional cruises to steady exploration of the world’s oceans.

Early Career and Pre-War Foundations

Born May 12, 1906, in Lockney, Texas, the eldest surviving child of a large farm family, Ewing earned his B.A. (1926), M.A. (1927), and Ph.D. (1931) from Rice Institute (now Rice University). His doctoral work focused on seismic ray paths. He taught at Lehigh University from 1930 to 1944 and began applying explosive seismology to study the Earth’s crust.

In the mid-1930s, with support from geologists like Richard Field and William Bowie, Ewing secured ship time on the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s research vessel RV Atlantis. He conducted pioneering seismic refraction surveys on the continental shelf off the U.S. East Coast. One early result: sediments up to 3,800 meters (12,467 feet) thick off Virginia. He also worked with Harry Hess aboard the submarine USS Barracuda to trace gravity anomalies around the Puerto Rico Trench and Lesser Antilles.

These shallow-water experiments sharpened the methods for deeper work and showed the contrast between continental and oceanic crust.

World War II and the SOFAR Channel

During WWII (on leave from Lehigh, working at Woods Hole), Ewing’s team advanced underwater acoustics for the U.S. Navy. They discovered the SOFAR (Sound Fixing and Ranging) channel, a deep layer of the ocean (roughly 700–1,300 meters (2,297–4,265 feet)) where the speed of sound is at its lowest, allowing low-frequency sound to travel thousands of kilometers with little attenuation. This had major implications for submarine detection, long-range communication, and the later SOSUS listening arrays. Ewing also developed the “sofar bomb” for precise sound ranging.

Ewing carried the instruments and skills from this wartime work into peacetime oceanography. In the same period he also took deep-water photographs, partly as a hobby and partly to help the government find ships sunk by U-boats.

The Landmark 1947 Atlantis Expedition to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge

After moving to Columbia University in 1946 (professor of geology in 1947), Ewing secured two months aboard RV Atlantis in summer 1947 for his first major post-war expedition focused on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The expedition, later called Atlantis Cruise 150, had support from the National Geographic Society. He outfitted the ship with an echo sounder that he and J. Lamar Worzel had modified to reach depths of 4,000 fathoms, towed hydrophones for seismic work, dredges, sediment corers, and underwater cameras.

Key findings included:

• Extensive mapping of ridge topography, revealing parallel ridges and troughs rather than a single massive feature.
• The discovery of flat abyssal plains (e.g., between Bermuda and the ridge), which were surprisingly level and covered by relatively young sediments.
• Dredged rocks (basalts and others) and seismic data indicating thin oceanic crust (around 5–6 km (3.11–3.73 miles) to the Mohorovičić discontinuity, or Moho, versus ~30+ km on continents).
• Early observations of a deep valley with steep slopes on the ridge flank, which Ewing interpreted as possibly a fault scarp and rift valley linked to earthquakes (the feature turned out to be the east-west Atlantis Fracture Zone).

This cruise produced immediate results, including a 1948 National Geographic article by Ewing on “Exploring the Mid-Atlantic Ridge” and a 1949 paper with Ivan Tolstoy. It challenged the idea of a still ocean floor and hinted at active processes. Bruce Heezen, newly recruited, was set to research documents and references on the ridge and did not sail on this cruise; Ivan Tolstoy ran the echo sounding.

Founding Lamont and the Era of Global Expeditions

In 1949, Ewing founded the Lamont Geological Observatory (now Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, LDEO) on the former Lamont estate in Palisades, New York. Ewing was its first director. It became a center for marine geophysics, with laboratories, a huge core collection and a strong focus on gathering data. Colleagues there included J. Lamar Worzel, Frank Press, Jack Oliver, Bruce Heezen and Marie Tharp.

Ewing prioritized dedicated ships for year-round operations rather than short, targeted cruises:

• RV Vema: A former schooner chartered and then purchased in the early 1950s. It logged over a million miles, the first research vessel to do so, circling the globe repeatedly and collecting continuous profiles of bathymetry, gravity, magnetism, and seismic data, plus hundreds of sediment cores (“a core a day” in some periods).
• RV Robert D. Conrad (acquired 1962): Another high-mileage vessel that also exceeded one million miles.

These ships were at sea most of the year (often more than 300 days), gathering data from every ocean on a scale never seen before. Ewing valued a large, broad body of observations as much as targeted experiments.

Major Discoveries with Colleagues

Ewing’s colleagues included Bruce Heezen, cartographer Marie Tharp, and sedimentologist David Ericson.

• Mid-Atlantic Ridge and Global Ridge System: Building on 1947 work and new profiles, Tharp identified a central rift valley in Atlantic crossings around 1952–1953. Heezen and Ewing linked it to earthquake epicenters. By the late 1950s, they showed the ridge system extended ~40,000 miles (65,000 km) worldwide. It is Earth’s largest geological feature and wraps around the globe like the seams on a baseball.
• Turbidity Currents: Cores and cable-break data (e.g., 1929 Grand Banks earthquake) confirmed powerful underwater sediment avalanches that carve canyons, transport material to abyssal plains, and explain disrupted layering.
• Oceanic Crust and Moho: Seismic refraction showed consistently thin crust (~5 km (3.11 miles)) beneath oceans.
• Sediment Cores and Paleoceanography: Thousands of cores revealed recent sediments on old seafloor, magnetic reversals (aiding dating and spreading confirmation), and climate records.
• Magnetic Anomalies: Towed magnetometer surveys produced striped patterns later key to seafloor spreading.
• Other: Abyssal plains formation, submarine canyons, heat flow, and more.

Ewing was at first cautious about continental drift, but his data and that of his colleagues proved crucial for Harry Hess’s seafloor spreading hypothesis and the plate tectonics revolution of the 1960s. Lamont data helped confirm it by the mid-to-late 1960s.

Instruments, Techniques, and Broader Impact

Ewing’s team improved or invented tools such as the piston corer (for longer, less-disturbed cores), precision depth recorders, air guns/sparkers (safer seismic sources), and deep-sea photography. They advanced continuous underway measurements and integrated multiple data types (bathymetry + seismic + gravity + magnetism + cores).

Ewing published over 340 scientific papers and served as president of the American Geophysical Union and the Seismological Society of America. He led Lamont until 1972, when he moved to the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. He was chief scientist on the Glomar Challenger (Deep Sea Drilling Project) and received major honors, including the National Medal of Science (1973) and the Penrose Medal (1974, after his death). The research vessel R/V Maurice Ewing, the Maurice Ewing Medals and the lunar ridge Dorsa Ewing are named after him. He died of a stroke in Galveston on May 4, 1974.

Connection to Atlantis

Cores recovered sand from depths of roughly 2 miles (3.22 kilometers) on or near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge

The National Geographic articles (primary sources). Ewing wrote two popular articles on the ridge for The National Geographic Magazine. The first, “Exploring the Mid-Atlantic Ridge” (Vol. 94, No. 3, September 1948, pp. 275–294), describes the 1947 expedition: bathymetry, seismic data, dredged rocks and sediment cores. The second, “New Discoveries on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge” (Vol. 96, No. 5, November 1949, pp. 611–640), reports on the next Atlantis cruise. It is in this second article that Ewing describes the sand most often cited in Atlantis discussions:

discovery of prehistoric beach sand in two core samples of the bottom, brought up in one case from a depth of two and in the other nearly three and one-half miles, far from any place where beaches exist today.

Maurice Ewing, "New Discoveries on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge," National Geographic Magazine, November 1949, p. 613

Ewing reported beach sand from two to three and a half miles down, far from any beach.

In the same passage Ewing dates the two sand layers in one core to 20,000 to 100,000 years and 225,000 to 325,000 years old. He notes that the grains are well sorted with no large fragments, unlike sand rafted out by ice. He then sets out two options: either the land sank two to three miles (3.22 to 4.83 kilometers), or the sea was once two to three miles (3.22 to 4.83 kilometers) lower. He calls either conclusion startling.

The 1947 cruise had already found sand. In their 1949 paper in the Bulletin of the Geological Society of America (“North Atlantic Hydrography and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge”), Tolstoy and Ewing report coarse quartz sand layers in a core taken on Cruise 150, about 20 miles (32.2 kilometers) southeast of Caryn Seamount. The sand was then being studied by David Ericson.

Atlantis proponents (in online discussions, books and videos, for example those referencing Randall Carlson) take the “beach sand” at depth as evidence that parts of the ridge or nearby areas were once above or close to sea level, and link it to Plato’s sunken island. Immanuel Velikovsky quoted the same passage in Earth in Upheaval (1955).

Ewing himself presented the sand as a geological puzzle. He did not refer to Atlantis, Plato or any lost civilization.

The Floors of the Oceans

In the monograph The Floors of the Oceans, I. The North Atlantic (Bruce C. Heezen, Marie Tharp and W. Maurice Ewing, Geological Society of America, 1959), the authors map and describe seafloor features. It includes a reference to the “Atlantis-Plato-Cruiser-Great Meteor Seamount Chain” south of the Azores.

This refers to real, named geological features (seamounts and guyots) in that region:

• There are seamounts named Atlantis Seamount, Plato Seamount, Cruiser Seamount and others, part of a chain running from the Azores area toward the Great Meteor Seamount. Great Meteor, the largest seamount in the North Atlantic, was discovered in 1938 by the German research vessel Meteor.
• These names likely come from survey ships (such as RV Atlantis) or normal naming practice, with “Plato” possibly a light nod to the philosopher.

For more finds linked to Atlantis, see Atlantean remnants.