Sylvia Earle is an oceanographer and marine botanist who writes and lectures about our oceans and is sometimes called “Her Deepness.”  She has led more than 100 diving expeditions and clocked more than 7,000 hours underwater.  She was the first female chief scientist of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and has been a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence since 1998.  She belongs to Ocean Elders, a group of scientists that is dedicated to protecting the ocean and and the marine life that live in the oceans.  She is also President and Co-Chair of Mission Blue, which is a nonprofit organization that she founded to inspire action to explore and protect the oceans and the marine life who depend on them.

Earle grew up in Florida and began her post-high school education at St. Petersburg Junior College. After she graduated, she followed up by earning a BS degree at Florida State University in 1955.  She continued to graduate school, where she met her first husband, Jack Taylor, a graduate student in zoology.  She obtained a Ph.D. degree in Phycology from Duke University in 1966. For her dissertation research, Earle collected more than 20,000 algae samples, to document the aquatic plants in the Gulf of Mexico.  Algae is critical to the ocean and the health of the planet, since they produce most of the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere through photosynthesis. To do this research, she became one of the first scientists to use SCUBA diving to obtain firsthand data on marine life.

Women working in science and engineering during  the 1960s were few and needed to be tough.  Earle worked hard to establish herself, with a number of roles and overlapping jobs.  She was a Radcliffe Institute Scholar (1967-1969,) research fellow at Harvard University (1967-1981,) and research associate at UC Berkeley (1969-1981.)

In February 1968, Earle participated in the Smithsonian Institution’s Man-in-Sea project, an experimental underwater habitat in the Bahamas that was a followup of earlier Man-in-Sea projects that were initiated by the inventor and entrepreneur, Edwin Link.  For this expedition, Earle descended in Link’s submersible Deep Diver, to a depth of 100 feet below the surface of the water and was the first woman scientist to do so.  She was four months pregnant at the time.

In 1969, Earle applied to join the Tektite Project, a research installation roughly fifty feet below the surface of the sea off the coast of the Virgin Islands. This platform allowed scientists to live submerged for up to several weeks at a time to study ocean life.  Even though she had logged more than 1,000 research hours underwater, she was not accepted into the program.  However, the next year, she was selected to lead the first all-female team of aquanauts in Tektite II.  She and the other women lived in the underwater habitat for two weeks, while they observed and photographed marine life.

During the early 1970s, Earle taught at UCLA and did a lot of educational outreach that she saw as her duty to explain to a lay audience what she had been able to observe from her research.  She also continued going on diving expeditions, including studies she conducted in Panama (1971,) the Galapagos Islands (1972,) and Comoro Islands, in the Indian Ocean (1975.) In 1976, Earle divorced Giles Mead, her second husband of nine years, and moved with her three children to the San Francisco area, where she took a position at the Califiornia Academy of Sciences.  That same year, she gave an address to a gathering of World Wildlife Fund members, and became convinced that she needed to start talking about taking care of our oceans.

In 1979, Earle made a remarkable open-ocean JIM suit dive near Oahu, Hawaii, becoming the first person to walk untethered on the ocean floor at a depth of 381 meters (1,250 ft.)  She still holds that record.  The same year, she received tenure as the Curator of Phycology at the California Academy of Sciences, where she taught until 1986.  Also, from 1980 to 1984, she served on the National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere.

In 1982 she and her third husband, Graham Hawkes, an engineer and submersible designer, established Deep Ocean Engineering.  This company was chartered to design, operate, support and consult on piloted and robotic subsea systems.  In 1985, the team designed and built Deep Rover, a research submersible that was capable of operating at a depth of around 1,000 meters (3,300 ft).  Deep Rover was tested in 1986, off the coast of Lee Stocking Island in the Bahamas.

In 1990, Earle resigned from the company to accept an appointment as Chief Scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA.)  She was the first woman to hold the position, and she stayed in that position for two years.

Earle’s interest in advanced marine engineering was still strong, so she founded Deep Ocean Exploration and Research (DOER Marine) in 1992.  The company, now run by her daughter Elizabeth, designs, builds, and operates marine equipment for deep-ocean applications.  Then, beginning in 1998, Earle started working as a National Geographic Explorer, leading the Sustainable Seas Expeditions project that continued for five years.

Over the years, oceanographers, botanists, and marine biologists have become increasingly concerned about the deterioration and pollution of the world’s oceans, and Earle developed an expertise on the impact of oil spills to marine life and ocean environments.  Based on her experiences with the 1989 Exxon Valdez and the 1990 Mega Borg oil spills, she led several research trips to acertain the environmental damage caused by Iraq’s destruction of Kuwaiti oil wells during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.  Earle was also called to consult during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

In addition to oil spills, the health of our oceans are affected by plastic pollution and climate change.  Still, Earle holds out hope, as she noted in a 2012 conversation with Krista Tippett for the podcast On Being:

…the good news is, nature is resilient, and places that have been protected in the last ten years show remarkable capacity to improve. That’s why I’m so pleased to be able to have this interview, to tell people, look, it’s not too late. There are things that you can do, that all of us together can do, to protect nature: to respect the trees, respect the fish, respect all forms of life, and realize, we’re part of the action.

Sylvia Earle (2012)

With financial support from winning the 2009 TED Prize, she launched the nonprofit organization Mission Blue that works to establish critical marine protected areas, called “Hope Spots,” around the world.  Mission Blue’s vision is to achieve 30% protection of the ocean by 2030.  By 2020, Mission Blue had created 122 Hope Spots in locations all over the globe.

Books by Sylvia Earle include The World is Blue, Sea Change, and Blue Hope: Exploring and Caring for Earth’s Magnificent Ocean.

Reference 1: Mission Blue, https://mission-blue.org.

Reference 2: TED Radio Hour, https://www.npr.org/2021/06/25/1009952391/sylvia-earle-my-wish-to-protect-our-oceans, June 25, 2021.

Reference 3: Boffey, Daniel, “Ocean cleanup device successfully collects plastic for first time” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/03/ocean-cleanup-device-successfully-collects-plastic-for-first-time, October 3, 2019.

Reference 4: Conversation with Sylvia Earle, On Being with Krista Tippett, podcast recorded June 7, 2012,  https://onbeing.org/programs/sylvia-earle-her-deepness-feb2018/.

Reference 5: Wallace White, New Yorker Magazine, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1989/07/03/her-deepness-wallace-white, June 26, 1989.

Reference 6: National Women’s History Museum, blogpost by Mariana Brandman,  https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/sylvia-earle.

Photo Credit 1: New Ship Honours Sylvia Earle, last updated 30 August 2021, https://www.auroraexpeditions.co.uk/blog/about-sylvia-earle/

Photo Credit 2: Ignotofsky, Rachel, “Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World,” Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, CA, p.93.

Photo Credit 3:  Brandman, Mariana, “Sylvia Earle,” National Women’s History Museum, 2021, www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/sylvia-earle.