[1] He worked with oceanographic cartographer Marie Tharp at Columbia University to map the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in the 1950s.

He interpreted their joint work on the Mid-Atlantic ridge and the East Pacific Rise as supporting S. Warren Carey's Expanding Earth Theory, developed in the 1950s,[2] but under Tharp's influence "eventually gave up the idea of an expanding earth for a form of continental drift in the mid-1960s."

Tharp was Heezen's assistant while he was a graduate student and he gave her the task of drafting seafloor profiles.

[4] At that lecture, preeminent geologist Harry Hess[5] told Heezen, "Young man, you have shaken the foundations of geology!

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.