Sylvia Earle - The Ocean Explorer

Nicola Ward (0:00)

Psst, it's time for the podcast. Yeah, the podcast is starting. What's a podcast?

Evan Wiebe (0:23)

Hello everybody, and thanks for temporarily lending me your ears for today's episode Stories From Now And Then. My name is Captain Blunderface. I officially welcome you back to the Old Library. Now just a second here. We're trying to decide what to do. The door to the back storage room here is open.

Well Deprecatus, it says no patrons allowed on the sign, but it doesn't say much about cats.

Yes, I'm also equally curious. This door is never open. Maybe just be careful. Okay, report back. And in the meantime, before we have our story today, our shout out goes to Adeline, who is four years old from Bloomington, Indiana. She is a dancer and loves mermaids and being a big sister is really important to her. And she loves listening to the podcast with her baby brother, Jack. So Adeline, thanks so much for listening to the show. Today's episode is for you.

And with that, it's time to pass it off to Nicola for today's story. Please take it away.

Nicola Ward (1:41)

This is a really exciting true story today because this story is about someone who is still alive and who has done some amazing things in her life. She is the Explorer of the Oceans. Her name is Sylvia Earle. Let's begin.

Sylvia Alice Earle was born on August 30th, 1935 in Gibbstown, New Jersey. She spent her early childhood on a farm. There was a forest and a pond nearby which she loved, and she spent long hours exploring the woods or crouched at the pond's edge, watching tadpoles, frogs, or whatever lived in the water there.

Her parents weren't the type to say, don't touch that, or get away from the muddy water. They instead encouraged her to look closely and to not be afraid of the unknown. Her mother taught her one rule, and Sylvia always remembered it. When you pick up a creature to examine it, you put it back exactly where you found it. You look closely, and then you let it go back home.

When Sylvia was about 12, her father was having trouble finding work as an electrician, and the family decided to move closer to his brother in Florida and start a new business together. So the family moved south to Clearwater, Florida, on the state's west coast, where the Gulf of Mexico rolls up onto warm sand. Sylvia did not want to go. She preferred the farm and didn't want to leave. But soon enough, she fell in love with the ocean and the waters of the Gulf Coast. At 16 years old, she made her first dive. Scuba diving gear barely existed yet, so she borrowed an old copper diving helmet, a very heavy round helmet that sits on your shoulders and is attached to a breathing hose. Her parents didn't have a lot of money and they hadn't gone to university themselves, but they encouraged her to work hard and she was an excellent student, eventually getting a scholarship to go to Florida State University to pursue her passion for exploring the ocean, and then on to Duke University for a master's degree and a doctorate where she studied algae, or algae, and seaweed, the plants of the sea. Plenty of scientists thought seaweed was a dull thing to spend years on, but Sylvia had worked out something they hadn't. Nearly everything in the ocean eats the plants, or eats the things that eat the plants.

Start with seaweed and you can follow the chain all the way to the whales.

By her thirties, she had logged more than a thousand hours underwater, more than almost any scientist alive. Then came Tektite. Tektite was a special science lab on the sea floor, fifty feet down, near the Virgin Islands. Scientists could live inside for weeks, swimming out whenever they liked and coming home to sleep. Ordinary people whose front garden happened to be made of coral. In 1969, Sylvia applied to go. They said no.

Not for lack of experience. She had more diving hours than anyone else who applied. They said no, because she was a woman, and no one in charge had worked out how to say yes to one. She applied again. In 1970, the answer changed. She was chosen to lead Mission 6 of Tektite 2 with a crew of women aquanauts, the first there had ever been. Down they went. For two weeks, they lived beneath the sea, swimming out among the reefs for ten or twelve hours a day. The fish stopped being frightened of them, and they went back to their ordinary business, close enough that Sylvia could tell one from another just by sight. Her team recorded more than a hundred and fifty different kinds of marine plant, including dozens never before noted in those waters. When they surfaced, reporters were waiting. The newspapers called them names like Aquababes, which was ridiculous, and Sylvia knew it was ridiculous. She also knew something the reporters didn't. For the first time, a great many people were listening to her. And when people are listening, you tell them about the ocean.