Sylvia Alice Earle Biography

Sylvia Alice Earle is an American marine biologist, explorer, author, and lecturer. She

has began a legacy of marine biography and became the leading woman of oceanography, called

"Her Deepness" by the New Yorker and the New York Times, "Living Legend" by the Library of

Congress, and first "Hero for the Planet" by Time magazine. Beginning with her associates from

St. Petersburg Jr. College, bachelors in science from FSU and masters in Phycology at Duke,

Earle began her world-changing ways throughout her career. From 1979 through 1986, Earle was

the Curator of Phycology at the California Academy of Sciences and a research associate at the

University of California, Berkeley during 1969 to 1981. Her Journey continued within education

as

a Radcliffe Institute Scholar from 1967 to 1969. After receiving her Ph.D. in 1966, Earle spent
a year as a research fellow at Harvard until 1981, then returned to Florida as the resident director
of the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory, where she resided as a director. In 1969, she applied to join
the Tektite Project, an installation fifty feet below the surface of the sea off the coast of the
Virgin Islands that allowed scientists to live submersed in their area of study for up to several
weeks. Although she had logged more than 1,000 research hours underwater, Earle was rejected
from the program. The next year, she was selected to lead the first all-female team of aquanauts
in Tektite II. In 1970, Sylvia Earle and four other women dove 50 feet below the surface to the
small structure they would call home for the next two weeks. The publicity surrounding this
adventure made Sylvia Earle a recognizable face beyond the scientific community. To their
surprise, the scientists found they had become celebrities and were given a ticker-tape parade and
a White House reception. After that Sylvia Earle was increasingly in demand as public speaker,
and she became an outspoken advocate of undersea research. At the same time, she began to
write for National Geographic and to produce books and films. Besides trying to arouse greater

public interest in the sea, she hoped to raise public awareness of the damage being done to our
aquasphere by pollution and environmental degradation. In the 1970s, scientific missions took
Sylvia Earle to the Galapagos, to the water off Panama, to China and the Bahamas and, again, to
the Indian Ocean. During this period she began a productive collaboration with undersea
photographer Al Giddings. Together, they investigated the battleship graveyard in the Caroline
Islands of the South Pacific.

In 1979, she made an open-ocean JIM suit dive to the sea floor near

Oahu, setting a women's depth record of 1,250 ft. In 1979 she also began her tenure as the

Curator of Phycology at the California Academy of Sciences, where she served until 1986. In

1982 she and her husband, Graham Hawkes, an engineer and submersible designer, founded

Deep Ocean Engineering to design, operate, support and consult on piloted and robotic subsea

systems. In 1985, the Deep Ocean Engineering team designed and built the Deep Rover research

submarine, which operates down to 3,300 ft. By 1986, Deep Rover had been tested, and Earle

joined the team conducting training off Lee Stocking Island in the Bahamas. She left the

company in 1990 to accept an appointment as Chief Scientist at the National Oceanic and

Atmospheric Administration, where she stayed until 1992. She was the first woman to hold that

position. In 1992 she founded Deep Ocean Exploration and Research (DOER Marine) to further

advance marine engineering. The company, now run by her daughter, Elizabeth, designs, builds

and operates equipment for deep-ocean environments. Since 1998 she has been a National

Geographic Explorer-in-Residence. From 1998 to 2002 she led the Sustainable Seas

Expeditions,
a five-year program to study the United States National Marine Sanctuary sponsored by the
National Geographic Society and funded by the Goldman Foundation. She was a leader of the
Sustainable Seas Expeditions, council chair for the Harte Research Institute for the Gulf of

Mexico Studies at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, and chair of the Advisory Council for the Ocean
in Google Earth. She also provided the DeepWorker 2000 submersible used to quantify the
species of fish as well as the space resources utilized within the Stellwagen Bank National
Marine Sanctuary. Earle has written children's books, including Coral Reefs, Hello Fish, Sea
Critters and Dive!, has founded three companies, among them DOER Marine (Deep Ocean
Exploration and Research) in Alameda, California and, in 2009, won a TED Prize. With TED's
support, she launched Mission Blue, which aims to establish marine protected areas (dubbed
"hope spots") around the globe.
From the seamounts of the high seas to the shallow sunlit reefs, Mission Blue seeks to
bring about a significant increase in ocean protection from less than four percent today to 20%
by the year 2020. Under Dr. Earle’s leadership, the Mission Blue team has embarked on a series
of expeditions to further this vision and shed light on these ocean Hope Spots. We also bring the
discoveries and stories of a network of ocean experts to the public through documentaries, social
and traditional media, and innovative tools like Google’s “Explore the Ocean” layer.
Additionally, we support the work of many conservation NGOs with whom we share the basic
mission of ocean protection and public awareness. Currently, the Mission Blue coalition includes
over 100 respected ocean conservation groups and like-minded organizations — from large
multinational companies down to individual scientific teams doing important research. Decades
of overfishing, pollution, climate change, acidification and other human pressures threaten the
fundamental nature of the ocean—and therefore threaten the future of humankind. We encourage
all global citizens who care about our ocean to reach out and support Mission Blue in any way
they can. Presently, less than four percent of the ocean is fully protected; just years ago, that

number was around 1 percent. With concerted effort and passionate people, we can continue this
positive trend and help create a global network of Hope Spots, the seeds of tomorrow’s healthy
ocean. With Mission Blue and its partners, Earle leads expeditions to Hope Spots around the
globe. Past expeditions include Cuba in 2009, Belize in January 2010, the Galápagos Islands in
April 2010, Costa Rica and the Central American Dome in early 2014 and the South African
Coast in late 2014. As of January 2015, there were 50 official Hope Spots around the world. The
crew has successfully began the restoration of coral ecosystems, create new hope spots within
the carribean and advocate the protection of the oceans through extensive marine conservation.
In 2011, she received an honorary doctorate from Smith College, and delivered the
commencement address at Warren Wilson College. At The Hague International Model United
Nations Conference, Earle gave a 14-minute speech in front of 3,500 delegates and United
Nations ambassadors. In July 2012, Earle led an expedition to NOAA's Aquarius underwater
laboratory, located off Key Largo, Florida. The expedition, entitled "Celebrating 50 Years of
Living Beneath The Sea," commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of Jacques Cousteau's
Conshelf I project and investigated coral reefs and ocean health. Mark Patterson co-led the
expedition with Earle.

Their aquanaut team also included underwater filmmaker D.J. Roller and

oceanographer M. Dale Stokes. Earle made a cameo appearance in the daily cartoon strip

Sherman's Lagoon in the week starting September 17, 2012, to discuss the closing of the

Aquarius Underwater Laboratory. She was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Nelson

Mandela Metropolitan University in 2013.

Written works on marine research conducted by Earle includes books such as Seaweeds

of the Gulf of Mexico and The Panamic Biota: Some Observations Prior to a Sea-Level Canal,

regarding the protection and preservation of algae and marine life within the pacific. Seaweeds of

the Gulf of Mexico outlines the importance of protozoa in the gulf of Mexico and the lengths at

which they may be protected. As Quoted from the text, “Our understanding of algal phylogeny

has dramatically increased with molecular evolutionary methods, and the latest research indicates

that the Rhodophyta is a distinct eukaryotic lineage that shares a most common ancestry with the

Chlorophyta in the Plant lineage (Oliveira and Bhattacharya 2000). A second cluster, the

Chromalveolata, comprises the Stramenopiles, in which the brown algae belong, in addition

to
diatoms, many zoosporic fungi, and the opalinids, among others (Palmer 2000, Adl etal.
2005).Of the three seaweed groups, the red algae are unique in the Tree of Life in that they share
a suite of characters that do not occur together in any other eukaryote, namely, a complete lack
of flagellated stages including absence of centrioles, flagellar basal bodies, or other 9+2
structures (Adl etal. 2005). The seaweeds exhibit a broad variety of morphologies and life
histories. Unlike green plants, animals, and even brown algae, red algae have attained this
diversity without having evolved true tissue differentiation (Hommersand and Fredericq 1990).
The molecular and biochemical mechanisms of their development remain largely unexplored.
The classification within the Rhodophyta at the ordinal level is unstable and in a constant flux,
more so than in the Chlorophyta and the Phaeophyceae, and it is currently undergoing much
taxonomic revision that has led to proposals of new and recircumscribed orders (Adl et al. 2005).
As misinterpretations of superficial similarities have resulted in erroneous systems of
classification at a variety of taxonomic levels, molecular-based phylogenies in the red, brown,
and green algae each provide an independent test of classification to the one based on
morphological or ultrastructural evidence. Besides elucidating relationships, phylogenetic
hypotheses inferred from gene sequence data provide the critical framework for studies of
morphological character evolution and life history evolution. Other written works of Earle’s
include childrens books and articles defining the protection of the oceans and its inhabitants.