Annapolis-based nonprofit prepares to set sail for Greenland to study climate change on the newly commissioned sailboat

There’s a saying among oceanographers that the bigger your ship, the better your research. The Annapolis-based Ocean Research Project would like to prove that adage wrong. Saturday at City Dock, the nonprofit commissioned its newest research vessel, the R/V Marie Tharp, a 72-foot, steel-hulled sailboat named for a 20th century marine cartographer who received little credit for her work mapping the ocean floor and developing the theory of continental drift. Because of arcane rules forbidding women onboard ships, Tharp did much of her groundbreaking work on land while her research partners took credit. Her namesake, by contrast, will sail around the world.