Sylvia Earle: Her Deepness

The second of three children born to electrical engineer Lewis Reade Earle and his wife, Alice Freas Richie, Earle spent much of her early life on a small farm near Camden, New Jersey. 

There, she developed a deep appreciation and love for nature. 

From a young age, her parents taught her to respect the wild and not to be afraid of the unknown. 

At the age of 12, her family moved to Dunedin, Florida, where the family’s waterfront property allowed Earle the opportunity to explore and learn about sea life. 

Her love for the ocean would eventually pave the way for her career.

Earle first learned to dive using SCUBA gear while attending Florida State University, where she majored in botany before graduating in 1955. That same year, she enrolled in Duke University’s master’s program in botany and graduated in 1956. 

Earle believed that understanding vegetation was the first step to understanding any ecosystem. 

She completed her thesis work on algae in the Gulf of Mexico before going on to complete a PhD in 1966. After earning her master’s degree, Earle took time off to marry and begin a family but remained active in marine exploration.

Since then, she has made it a mission to document every plant species that can be found in the Gulf of Mexico. 

Earle’s career eventually allowed her to attend Harvard as a research fellow and then become resident directorship of the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory in Florida. 

In 1968, when she was four months pregnant, Earle travelled a hundred feet below the waters of the Bahamas in the submersible Deep Diver. 

But Earle’s research didn’t stop there. 

In 1969 she participated in the Tektike Project.

Sponsored by the US Navy, the Department of the Interior and NASA, the venture allowed teams of scientists to live for weeks in an enclosed habitat on the ocean floor 100 feet below the surface, off the Virgin Islands.

Earle had already spent thousands of research hours underwater but went on to create and lead Tektite II, Mission 6, an all-female research expedition, earning the record title for the first all-female aquanaut research team. 

In 1970, she and four other women dove 50 feet below the surface to the small area they would live in for the next two weeks, earning an additional record for the longest time spent living in an underwater fixed habitat by a female. During the two-week experiment, she watched the effects of pollution on coral reefs. When she and her team returned to the surface, they were honoured at the White House.

In 1970, Earle and her family moved to Los Angeles where she began teaching at UCLA. She hosted several talks around the country explaining her underwater explorations and even wrote for publications including National Geographic. 

Additionally, she continued to go on marine expeditions throughout the world, usually serving as their chief scientist.

On 19 September 1979, Earle wore a pressurized suite and was carried to a depth of 381 metres (1,250 feet), where she separated from the submersible and discovered the sea floor for two and a half hours. 

In the 1980s, Earle teamed up with engineer Graham Hawkes (her third husband) and founded the companies Deep Ocean Engineering and Deep Ocean Technology where they designed and built underwater vehicles that helped scientists work at extraordinary depths. 

Together they designed the submersible Deep Rover, a vehicle capable of reaching depths of 914 metres (3,000 feet) beneath the surface of the ocean.

In fact, in 1985, Earle achieved the deepest solo descent by submersible (female) by descending 1,000 metres (3,280 feet) aboard the Deep Rover submersible, off San Clemente Island, California, USA.

In the early 1990s, however, Earle decided to take a leave of absence from her companies to work as Chief Scientist of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, becoming the first female National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) chief scientist.  

Between 1990 and 1992, she was responsible for monitoring the health of the country’s waters and would report on the environmental damage caused by Iraq’s burning of the Kuwaiti oil fields.  

Throughout her career, Earle has made many important scientific contributions that have helped us better understand the deep-sea ecosystem and just how important it is to protect it. Earle’s pioneering research on marine ecosystems also saw her named the first TIME Magazine Hero of the Planet in 1998.