The Gear That Kept Ocean Maverick Sylvia Earle Afloat

Oceanographer and marine biologist Sylvia Earle wore this sea-beaten vest in the mid-1970s, designed to help divers rise, sink, or hover by adding or releasing air. Earle, now 91 and both a National Geographic Explorer at Large and Rolex Testimonee, led the first all-woman aquanaut research team in 1970 and later served as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s first female chief scientist, among many other achievements. The vest is one of several pieces of gear in the archives that once belonged to “Her Deepness”—the nickname Earle picked up after setting a still-unbeaten record, in 1979, for the deepest untethered walk on the ocean floor.

Other items in the collection include a pair of diving fins that Earle wore during a 1991 trip to the oil-slicked waters of the Persian Gulf. Several months after she came aboard at NOAA, as the Persian Gulf War raged, Iraqi forces occupying Kuwait dumped perhaps eight million barrels of oil into the sea, apparently to foil an American landing on Kuwait’s coast. To gauge the extent of the devastation, Earle journeyed to the war zone.

Two years before, she had documented some of the fallout from Alaska’s headline-making Exxon Valdez oil spill, but the scale of the mess in the Persian Gulf, Earle says, was vaster. Oil had drifted from Iraq and Kuwait’s relatively small stretch of coast into mangrove forests and seagrass marshes in neighboring Saudi Arabia. What’s more, she and her team found oil affecting creatures and habitats underwater, a stark rebuttal to the conventional wisdom at the time that oil spills were primarily a problem at the surface. “People had not been really looking beneath the surface,” Earle recalls. “It was obvious very quickly that, yes, some oil floats, but some sinks too, and it was an awakening to see seagrasses slathered with oil.”

The expedition changed our thinking about how such spills pose threats to marine life, and the oil left stains that remain on Earle’s fins to this day.

Earle is still diving, these days with gear of more recent vintage. She counts herself lucky to have launched her career during the advent of scuba, at a time when new equipment was enabling exploration that previous generations could only dream of. And the current moment, she suggests, is similarly auspicious for young scientists—not only because of technology. “It is becoming more normal to protect than to destroy,” Earle says. “If you could choose a time to be a human being on Earth, I think in some ways it’s the best time ever.”