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Sylvia Earle was born in Gibbstown, New Jersey on August 30, 1935.
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After earning her Master's at Duke University, Sylvia Earle took time off to marry and start a family but remained active in marine exploration.
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When Sylvia was 13, the family moved to Clearwater, Florida, on the Gulf of Mexico. Soon, Sylvia was learning all she could about the wildlife of the Gulf and its coast.
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She was an exceptional student and won scholarships to the Florida State. Throughout her school years, she supported herself by working in college laboratories.
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In 1964, when her children were only two and four, she left home for six weeks to join a National Science Foundation expedition in the Indian Ocean.
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Throughout the mid-1960s, she struggled to balance the demands of her family with scientific expeditions that took her all over the world.
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In 1966 Sylvia Earle received her Ph.D. from Duke. Her dissertation In 1966 Sylvia Earlec. Her dissertation "Phaeophyta of the Eastern Gulf of Mexico" created a sensation in the oceanographic community. Never before had a marine scientist made such a long and detailed first-hand study of aquatic plant life.
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In 1968, Dr. Earle traveled to a hundred feet below the waters of the Bahamas in the c. She was four months pregnant at the time.
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In 1969 she applied to participate in the Tektite project. This venture, sponsored jointly by the U.S. Navy, the Department of the Interior and NASA allowed teams of scientist to live for weeks at a time in an enclosed habitat on the ocean floor fifty feet below the surface, off the Virgin Islands.
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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.
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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.
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In 1977 they made their first voyage following the great sperm whales. In a series of expeditions they followed the whales from Hawaii to New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Bermuda and Alaska. Their journeys were recorded in the documentary film Gentle Giants of the Pacific (1980).
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In 1979, Sylvia Earle walked on the bottom of the sea using a special suit.
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She described this adventure in her 1980 book: Exploring the Deep Frontier.
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In the 1980s, along with engineer Graham Hawkes, she started the companies Deep Ocean Engineering and Deep Ocean Technologies.
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In the early 1990s, Dr. Earle took a leave of absence from her companies to serve as Chief Scientist of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. There, among other duties, Sylvia Earle was responsible for monitoring the health of the nation's waters. In this capacity she also reported on the environmental damage wrought by Iraq's burning of the Kuwaiti oil fields.
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Today she is explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society. Wherever future journeys take her, we can be certain that Sylvia Earle will be in the forefront of deep ocean exploration.