Sylvia Earle: The Marine Biologist Pioneering Ocean Exploration and Conservation

Sylvia Earle is a marine biologist, ocean explorer, and conservationist, as well as an author and lecturer. She set several milestones for women in oceanography, including becoming the first female chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). According to the National Geographic Society, Earle has led more than 100 ocean expeditions and has spent more than 7,000 hours underwater. One of the achievements of her long, successful career in oceanography was her establishment in 2009 of Mission Blue, a project to create a global network of marine protected areas.

Sylvia Alice Reade Earle was born on August 30, 1935, in Gibbstown, New Jersey. She grew up on a small farm near Camden with her father, Lewis Reade Earle, and her mother, Alice Freas Richie. She enjoyed exploring the forests near her home, as well as the beach when the family visited the Jersey Shore. When Sylvia was thirteen, the family moved to Clearwater, Florida, on the coast by the Gulf of Mexico, where her fascination with the ocean and ocean life grew. She later described life there as “living on the edge of the great unknown every day.” She earned a bachelor’s degree in botany from Florida State University and a master’s degree from Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, in the mid-1950s. After marrying and starting a family, she returned to Duke to obtain a doctorate in phycology (the study of algae) in 1966. Earle would eventually be married three times and have three children: a son and two daughters.

Earle’s professional career has always focused mostly on research and academics. From 1967 to 1981, she worked in research at Harvard University, Cape Haze Marine Laboratory, and the University of California, Berkeley. In 1968, she became the first female scientist to explore the sea in the Deep Diver submersible. In 1970, she became the leader of the Tektite II Project, in which an all-female group of scientists lived and conducted research for two weeks in a sea-floor habitat about 50 feet below the ocean surface off the coast of the Virgin Islands. It was the Tektite II Project that first brought her great national and international acclaim, including a reception at the White House.

Earle set a depth record for walking untethered on the sea floor in 1979 when she walked 1,250 feet (381 meters) below the ocean surface near Oahu. She wore a metal, pressurized JIM suit (named after diver Jim Jarrett), resembling a spacesuit, for the historic two-and-a-half-hour walk. Only a communication line connected her to the submersible that had carried her down. Also in 1979, she became curator of phycology at the California Academy of Sciences, serving in that position until 1986.

Earle and Graham Hawkes, a British engineer and her third husband, founded two companies called Deep Ocean Engineering and Deep Ocean Technologies in 1982. The companies specialized in designing, operating, and consulting on underwater exploration crafts, both piloted and robotic. One of the companies’ most celebrated creations is the Deep Rover research submarine, which is capable of operating to a depth of 3,300 feet (1,000 meters). Earle founded another marine engineering company, called Deep Ocean Exploration and Research, in 1992. That company later became headed by Earle’s daughter, Elizabeth.

Earle was appointed as chief scientist at NOAA in 1990 and served in the position for two years. In 1998, she was named an explorer-in-residence with the National Geographic Society (NGS). She led the NGS’s Sustainable Seas Expeditions program from 1998 to 2002. Earle’s knowledge of the effects of oil spills on marine ecology allowed her to be an expert advisor on several oil spill disasters, including the Exxon Valdez (1989) and Mega Borg (1990) oil spills, as well as the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig explosion (2010).

With her establishment of Mission Blue, or the Sylvia Earle Alliance, in 2009, she was able to put all her experience and knowledge together in an ambitious project to explore, research, and protect many ecologically important regions throughout the ocean, as well as to educate the public about the need to preserve these regions. Mission Blue was established with the financial support of TED (a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting innovative ideas in technology, entertainment, and design), and it includes a coalition of more than 100 conservation groups and other organizations. As part of this project, Earle has carried out a number of expeditions to so-called “hope spots,” ocean sites that Earle and her team believe should belong to a worldwide network of marine protected areas. Mission Blue’s primary goal is to increase the percentage of fully protected ocean areas from about 2 percent of the global sea (as of 2015) to 20 percent by 2020. The almost sixty hope spots include areas of the sea near Cuba, Belize, Costa Rica, the Galapagos Islands, South Africa, and other landmasses. A documentary about Mission Blue was released in 2014 via Netflix.

In addition to Earle’s scientific and corporate work, she has written numerous articles and books for both research publications and the general public. Some of her most popular titles include Exploring the Deep Frontier: The Adventure of Man in the Sea (1980); Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans (1996); Dive: My Adventures in the Deep Frontier (1999, for children); The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One (2010); and Blue Hope: Exploring and Caring for Earth’s Magnificent Ocean (2014). A. J. Smuskiewicz

FURTHER READING:American Academy of Achievement. 2016. “Sylvia Earle Biography.” http://www.achievement.org/ autodoc/page/ear0bio-1. Accessed October 3, 2016.

Earle, Sylvia. 2014. Blue Hope: Exploring and Caring for Earth’s Magnificent Ocean. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society.

Frazier, Ian. 2015. “Can Sylvia Earle Save the Oceans?” Outside Magazine. November 12. https:// www.outsideonline.com/2030946/marine-biologist-sylvia-earle-profile. Accessed October 3, 2016.

Mission Blue, Sylvia Earle Alliance. 2016. “About Us.” https://www.mission-blue.org/about/. Accessed October 3, 2016.

National Geographic Society, Explorers. 2015. “Sylvia Earle.” http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ explorers/bios/sylvia-earle/. Accessed October 3, 2016.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Ocean Explorer. 2002. “Sustainable Seas 2002 Explorers: Sylvia Earle.” http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/projects/02sse/team/team.html. Accessed October 3, 2016.

Pearson, Bridget. 2015. “The Sensational Story of Scuba Diving.” Diviac Travel September 22. http://magazine.diviac.com/the-sensational-story-of-scuba-diving. Accessed October 3, 2016.

Sea and Sky. Meet the Ocean Explorers. 2016. “Sylvia Earle.” http://www.seasky.org/ocean -exploration/ocean-explorers-sylvia-earle.html. Accessed October 3, 2016.