Dr. Sylvia A. Earle - 2019

Sylvia Earle, PhD American oceanographer and explorer known for her research on marine algae and her books and documentaries designed to raise awareness of the threats that overfishing and pollution pose to the world’s oceans. A pioneer in the use of modern self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA) gear and the development of deep-sea submersibles, Earle also held the world record for the deepest untethered dive.

Earle was the second of three children born to electrical engineer Lewis Reade Earle and his wife, Alice Freas Richie. She spent her early life on a small farm near Camden, New Jersey, where she gained a respect and appreciation for the wonders of nature through her own explorations of nearby woods and the empathy her parents showed to living things. When she was 12, her father moved the family to Dunedin, Florida, where the family’s waterfront property afforded Earle the opportunity to investigate living things inhabiting nearby salt marshes and sea grass beds.

Earle first learned to dive with SCUBA gear while attending Florida State University. She majored in botany and graduated in 1955. Later that year she enrolled in the master’s program in botany at Duke University, graduating in 1956. She completed her thesis work on algae in the Gulf of Mexico. She completed a PhD in 1966, publishing her dissertation Phaeophyta of the Eastern Gulf of Mexico in 1969. For this project she collected over 20,000 samples of algae. Earle’s postgraduate experiences were a mixture of research and groundbreaking oceanographic exploration. In 1965, she accepted a position as the resident director of Cape Haze Marine Laboratories in Sarasota, Florida. Two years later she became a research fellow at the Farlow Herbarium of Harvard University and a research scholar at the Radcliffe Institute. The next year she discovered undersea dunes off the coast of the Bahamas. In 1970, she led the first all-female team of women aquanauts as part of the Tektite II experiment, a project designed to explore the marine realm and test the viability of deepwater habitats and the health effects of prolonged living in underwater structures. The habitat was located about 15 meters (about 50 feet) below the surface of Great Lameshur Bay off the island of St. John in the US Virgin Islands. During the two-week experiment, she observed the effects of pollution on coral reefs firsthand. Occurring during a time when American women were just beginning to enter fields traditionally staffed by men, the Tektite II project captured the imagination of scientists and nonscientists alike because Earle’s team did the same work as previous all-male crews.

Earle led numerous undersea expeditions over her career. Her oceanographic research took her to such places as the Galapagos Islands, China, and the Bahamas. In the 1970s she began an association with the National Geographic Society to produce books and films on life in Earth’s oceans. In 1976 she became a curator and a research biologist at the California Academy of Sciences. In 1979, she became curator of phycology at the California Academy of Sciences. On September 19, 1979, she set the world untethered diving record, descending 381 meters (1,250 feet) beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean in a JIM diving suit, a special diving apparatus that maintains an interior pressure of 1 standard atmosphere (14.70 pounds per square inch). During the early 1980s Earle founded Deep Ocean Engineering and Deep Ocean Technology with British engineer Graham Hawkes. Together they designed the submersible Deep Rover, a vehicle capable of reaching depths of 914 meters (3,000 feet) beneath the surface of the ocean.

Earle served on the National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere between 1980 and 1984. Between 1990 and 1992 Earle was the chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the first woman to serve in that position. In 1998 she became the National Geographic Society’s first female explorer in residence. Throughout her career she published over 100 scientific papers. Her other works include Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans (1994), Wild Ocean: America’s Parks Under the Sea (1999) with American author Wolcott Henry, and The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One (2009).