Sylvia Alice Earle
Earle, Sylvia Alice (1935-) is an American oceanographer and environmentalist. In 1979, she was the first person to dive solo to 1,250 feet (381 meters) beneath the surface without being connected to a support vessel.
Earle was born on Aug. 30, 1935, in Gibbstown, New Jersey. When she was 12, Earle's family moved to Dunedin, Florida, on the Gulf of Mexico. She received a scholarship to attend Florida State University and received her bachelor's degree in 1955. That fall, she entered the graduate program at Duke University and received her master's degree in botany in 1956. In 1964, she joined a National Science Foundation expedition on the Indian Ocean. Two years later, she received her doctor's degree from Duke University. Her dissertation was a long and detailed first-hand study of aquatic plant life, a project that she continues to work on.
In 1966, Earle became resident director of the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory in Florida. In 1967, she became a research scholar at the Radcliffe Institute and research fellow at the Farlow Herbarium at Harvard. In 1970, she participated in the government funded Tektite II Project. She and four other scientists lived for two weeks in an enclosed chamber 50 feet (15 meters) below the surface on the ocean floor, off the Virgin Islands.
During the 1960's and 1970's, Earle took scientific missions to the Galapagos, the Bahamas, and the Indian Ocean. In 1979, she was the first person to dive solo to 1,250 feet (381 meters) beneath the surface without being connected to a support vessel.
In 1981, Earle and her future husband, engineer Graham Hawkes, founded the companies Deep Ocean Engineering and Deep Ocean Technology. The companies designed and built undersea vehicles. In the 1990's, Earle served as chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). For NOAA, Earle helped determine environmental damage caused by Iraq's destruction of Kuwaiti oil wells during the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
Earle was married to John Taylor from 1957 to 1966 and Giles Mead from 1967 to 1976. She has two children from her first marriage and one child from her second marriage. She married Graham Hawkes in 1986; the couple separated in 1990.
Earle is the author of over 100 publications on marine life, including the book Sea Change (1995), which pleads for the preservation of the oceans.