SYLVIA EARLE IS AN OCEANOGRAPHER
SUBJECT
Sylvia Earle
OCCUPATION
Marine biologist
INTERVIEWER
Livia Albeck-Ripka
PHOTOGRAPHER
Kip Evans
LOCATION
New York, US
DATE
March 2018
ANTIDOTE TO
Fear of depth
UNEXPECTED
Trekkie
One day in September 1979, Sylvia Earle became the first person to walk under a quarter mile of water untethered on the ocean floor. “As I stepped from the platform,” she wrote in one of her books, Exploring the Deep Frontier, “I was aware that I was venturing onto terrain in some ways comparable to the surface of the moon.” Not only were the “slopes and craggy ridges” similar, she wrote, but they were “equally unexplored.” And, until her groundbreaking expedition in Hawaii, they had been just as unreachable. Now, says Sylvia, we know more than ever about the ocean, but we are also destroying it at an unprecedented rate.
“Divers are great ocean ambassadors because they get their faces underwater; they see what most people do not.”
When Sylvia was a girl growing up in Gibbstown, New Jersey, the ocean was abundant with coral, fish and unknown lifeforms. Sylvia wanted to unravel these mysteries—to see the “long-legged, bright-red galatheid crabs,” the “small, sleek, dark brown lantern fish” and the “blue-green flashes of small, transparent creatures.” And to understand them. She did not know that one day, people would call her “Her Deepness,” or that she would be the only woman on a 70-person Indian Ocean expedition; that she would lead a five-woman team of “aquanauts” who lived underwater for two weeks; set a world diving record; become a submarine designer; or become the first woman chief scientist of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
She also did not know that by 2018, there would be hundreds of oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, that people would have killed off half of the oceans’ wildlife, that climate change would have bleached much of the world’s coral, or that there would be a Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the sea. Now, when Sylvia is not diving in Cancun, the Bahamas or Indonesia, she is travelling the world, educating people about the parts of the ocean and the creatures in those place that most need protection. Sylvia has named these “Hope Spots.” It is not too late, she insists, for human beings to help the ocean recover—especially given everything we now know.
Reflecting on her dive that day in Hawaii, Sylvia wrote of how she observed the corals, intimately. “Why do they pulse with light?” she asked, “Why do they glow at night? How do they and their neighbours survive in the eternal night of the deep sea?” Still
