Dr. Sylvia Earle
speaker
80 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Dr. Sylvia Earle’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Are you okay with signing up and being a part of an organization that's doing something that you see as doing the right thing by your measure? Whatever it is you've got, do you have resources that you can invest in solutions? Everybody can do something.
Nobody can do it all, but working together, we can come up with ways, starting in your backyard or starting in your community, to give back to nature. Understand, just think, craft your own recipe for what you can do that is special to you. I mean, there are people who sing and they convert people with their inspiration.
There are those who write, whether it's poetry or scientific articles, they're using what they've got to go from where we are to get to a better place. Kids go out on the beach, they start picking up trash.
And you see grown-ups... watching the kids take the leadership. The kids can inspire all of us. Their future is on the line. And, you know, I have for many years worked with National Geographic and have been involved as an explorer with them and going way back and tell stories and inspire people and then find something that you can do that inspires you.
To be able to walk freely, people cannot normally dive in compressed air or even using a mixture of gases. On scuba, 50 meters, you know, 150 feet is a deep dive. With special mixes of gases, you can go down deeper than that. But not very many people do it because it's Experimental. Commercial divers do it in the oil patch, in the salvage work.
But you wouldn't do it recreationally for the most part. But to be able to package yourself, as I did, in a system that is one atmosphere. I was in a system that is known as an armored suit. It's like a suit of armor, actually. It keeps the pressure.
And so I could go down, as I did, to 400 meters. It's 1,250 feet. Wow. And normally there would be a line going all the way back to the surface.
Using a diving suit of that sort.
Descended and then walked off. And there was a communication line between the submersible and myself, but no line back to the surface.
Time on the ocean floor was... Two and a half hours, which is about the same as that first moonwalk.
I was full alert.
Well, mundane. I was thinking the port, the little window that I... There are three little round portholes that I could look through. They were fogging up. The water around was cold. Inside it was warm because I'm a warm-bodied person. And I had to keep scrubbing the glass so I could see. But, you know, the time went by so fast. It was just glorious. It's right at the edge of light.
It's the twilight zone, literally, where I can look up and I can see that it's slightly lighter above than below. And these luminous creatures, little fish with lights down the side.
No, but the submarine that was nearby had lights and I asked them, turn off the lights. so I can see what it's like to be there without seeing what the creatures experience. And there were some long, whisker-like corals that are about six to nine feet tall. And when you touch them, They just burst with bioluminescence, little rings of blue fire. Wow.
And I just was mesmerized, of course, but I could not take any photographs. You know, fast forward to about three years ago when I was able to go back with my grandsons. Oh, wow. I have four grandsons, two are with me, and we had a new low light level camera, which means you can almost take pictures in the dark. Tiny bit of light, bioluminescence is enough to be able to image these creatures.
So instead of just going down and experiencing bamboo coral doing its amazing light show, I was able to go and share the view with with my grandsons, and they, using this fancy new equipment, documented it.
It was pure joy. Curiously, it didn't start out that way when the notice appeared on the bulletin board at Harvard. Anybody wants to live underwater for a couple of weeks?
This is during the high point of going to the moon, so astronauts and aquanauts were kind of mushed together with a similar kind of aura. And as a scientist, the idea that I could actually... Stay underwater and use the ocean as a laboratory, day and night. Swim out any time you wanted to. Get to know individual fish and really see the ocean in a new way.
And I talked with some of my fish friends, ichthyologists who specialize in fish, and they We decided to team up and we put together, I thought, some pretty good proposals that went to the Smithsonian. They thought they were great proposals, but there was a glitch. They did not expect women to apply at all. They never bothered because there are no women astronauts until 1986. This is 1969.
So the head of the program, James Miller, I think had a good marriage, had a good relationship with his mother and had a daughter. His response when said, should we really think about having women? He goes, well, why not? Half the fish are female. Guess we could put up with a few women. But they couldn't let men and women live together underwater in 1970. Different culture.
Showing 21–40 of 80 · page 2 of 4
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