SeaDeep Diving FL

The Trump administration is dismantling a $368 million deep-ocean observation system to monitor coastal environments, marine ecosystems and powerful currents that affect the global climate. The National Science Foundation said it would send ships in June to begin removing more than 900 deep-sea instruments anchored off Oregon, Washington State, Alaska, North Carolina, and an area between Greenland and Iceland. Read more: https://nyti.ms/4vhRdvm

SS United States one step closer to becoming 'world's largest artifical reef'

The environmental remediation of the historic SS United States has officially been completed, bringi...

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In 1979, she was strapped to the front of a submarine and carried down into the dark, to a depth where the pressure could crush a human body like an empty can.
At 1,250 feet below the surface, she detached from the submersible.
And then she walked.
Alone. Untethered. On the floor of the open ocean.
For two and a half hours, in a pressurized suit, Sylvia Earle explored a world no human being had ever stood in before — at a depth no person has equaled in an untethered walk since.
They call her "Her Deepness."
And the path that took her to the bottom of the sea began at a backyard pond in New Jersey.
She was born on August 30, 1935, in Gibbstown, New Jersey, and grew up on a small farm near Camden.
Neither of her parents had attended college.
But they gave her something more valuable than a degree: a love of the natural world.
She spent hours by the pond in her backyard, filling jars with fish and tadpoles, recording her observations in notebooks like a scientist long before she knew the word.
When she was thirteen, her family moved to the Gulf Coast of Florida.
And the Gulf of Mexico became her laboratory.
She was a brilliant student.
She graduated high school at sixteen.
She earned a scholarship to Florida State University, studied botany, and graduated at nineteen.
Along the way, she did something most scientists of her era never considered: she became a certified SCUBA diver — so she could study ocean plants not from a boat or a lab, but firsthand, in the water, among them.
By twenty, she had a master's degree in botany from Duke University.
She had found her life's subject: the algae and plant life of the sea — the organisms that, through photosynthesis, produce most of the oxygen in Earth's atmosphere.
The ocean, she understood early, was not separate from life on land.
It was the engine of it.
She pursued her Ph.D. while building a family — marrying, having children, suspending and resuming her studies.
In 1964, she was invited on a six-week research voyage to the Indian Ocean.
It was a demanding assignment rarely offered to women at the time.
Earle was used to being the only woman in the room. She made the most of it.
Over the next two years, she joined expeditions to the Galápagos, the coast of Chile, and the Panama Canal Zone — all while completing her coursework and writing her dissertation, and while serving as resident director of a marine laboratory in Florida.
She earned her Ph.D. in 1966.
For her dissertation, she collected more than 20,000 samples of algae to catalog the aquatic plant life of the Gulf of Mexico — one of the first scientists ever to use SCUBA to document marine life directly.
It remained a landmark study for decades.
She kept going deeper.
In 1968, four months pregnant with her third child, she descended 100 feet below the surface in a submersible to enter an experimental underwater habitat as part of a Smithsonian project — the first woman scientist to do so in that way.
Then came Tektite.
In 1969, she applied to the Tektite II project — a program sponsored by the U.S. Navy, NASA, and the Department of the Interior, allowing scientists to live and work in a habitat fifty feet underwater for extended periods.
Earle was more than qualified. No one had more diving experience than she did.
But government officials balked at the idea of men and women living together in the habitat.
So Earle did something about it.
In 1970, she led an all-female team into the underwater habitat — living beneath the sea for two weeks, observing and photographing the marine life around them.
When they surfaced, they were celebrities.
They were honored at the White House. They were given a parade in Chicago.
And Sylvia Earle realized something that would shape the rest of her life: she now had a platform — and she could use it to make the world fall in love with the ocean.
She taught at UCLA. She wrote for National Geographic. She gave talks across the country.
She kept diving — often as the chief scientist of major expeditions.
She followed great s***m whales across the Pacific in a series of expeditions captured in documentary film.
And in 1979, she made the historic untethered walk on the sea floor that earned her a place in the record books — and the nickname that would follow her for the rest of her life.
Her Deepness.
In the 1980s, she co-founded engineering companies to design and build the submersibles and underwater vehicles that would let scientists reach depths never before accessible — pushing not just her own exploration, but the entire field's reach into the deep.
In 1990, she was appointed Chief Scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — NOAA.
She was the first woman ever to hold the position.
As the nation's top ocean scientist, she was responsible for safeguarding the health of America's waters.
In 1995, she published Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans — a call to action to protect the seas before it was too late.
Across her career, she has led more than 100 marine expeditions, logged over 7,000 hours underwater, authored more than 200 publications, lectured in more than 80 countries, and received 27 honorary degrees and over 100 honors worldwide.
She was named Time magazine's first-ever Hero for the Planet in 1998.
She received the United Nations Champion of the Earth award.
She won the TED Prize.
And she used that TED Prize to launch what may be her most enduring work.
She founded Mission Blue — an alliance dedicated to protecting the ocean through a global network of "Hope Spots": critical marine areas around the world identified for protection, the underwater equivalent of national parks.
Her argument has been consistent across her entire life, and it grows more urgent every year.
The ocean is not a resource to be emptied.
It is the life-support system of the entire planet — producing the oxygen we breathe, regulating the climate, holding the biodiversity on which all of Earth's interconnected ecosystems depend.
And it is in danger.
She has spent her life trying to make the rest of us see what she saw, alone, in the dark, at 1,250 feet down.
That the ocean is alive.
That it is worth saving.
And that we are running out of time to do it.
The girl at the backyard pond with her jars and her notebooks became the most renowned ocean scientist in the world.
She went deeper than any human had gone on foot, and stood where no one had stood.
And then she came back up to spend the rest of her life trying to protect what she had seen.
She is, still, one of the most powerful voices the ocean has ever had.
Her Deepness.