Science: Doc

At a Manhattan dinner last week Professor Maurice Ewing, director of Columbia University's Lament Geological Observatory, received the first $25,000 Vetle-sen Prize-for high achievement in the earth sciences (geology, seismology, oceanography, etc). From Columbia's onetime president, Dwight Eisenhower, came a message of congratulation; from assembled speakers came paeans of praise. But as the tributes converged on his rumpled head, Maurice Ewing, 53, most likely was thinking about a ridge in the floor of the Pacific which, according to one of his theories, should have a crack running along its peak.

Oceanographer Ewing, called...

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