Pioneering oceanographer Sylvia Earle on her lifelong fight to protect the ocean

Earle has since built a formidable portfolio that includes positions at Harvard University and the California Academy of Sciences, and being the first female chief scientist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She has also authored more than 250 scientific and technical publications, and received 32 honorary degrees. She shares that she often returns to a simple piece of wisdom: “A famous biologist (Louis Agassiz) once said, ‘Study nature, not books’. Nature is a great teacher. The best.”

It is advice she follows every day—and one we saw in action as we dived with her and Titouan Bernicot in the waters between Koh Mak and Koh Kood, the islands at the heart of Coral Gardeners’ newest conservation hub. The non‑profit organisation that the 27‑year‑old Bernicot founded in French Polynesia in 2017 has built one of the world’s most innovative reef‑restoration programmes and with support from the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative is growing tens of thousands of corals each year.

Launched in 2019, the Perpetual Planet Initiative champions explorers, organisations, scientists and entrepreneurs working to safeguard the planet. For the oceans, this has meant long-term commitments to reef restoration, marine science and the defence of biodiversity hotspots, including Mission Blue—the global ocean conservation initiative founded by Earle to safeguard ecologically vital marine areas known as Hope Spots—alongside Coral Gardeners and other leaders driving change on the front lines of ocean protection.

Underwater, Earle moved gracefully but paused often with deliberate curiosity. Her eyes lit up through her mask as she pointed out anything that caught her attention. “She stops every 50cm,” Bernicot later teased affectionately. “She’ll see something you didn’t even see—a hole, a sea urchin, a sponge. I’ve been coming here the last four years, but with her, it’s almost like I’m diving here for the first time.”

“But they’re all miracles,” Earle responded earnestly. “Earth is a miracle. Every living thing is a miracle when you think about how it came to be, whether you’re looking at a leaf on a tree or an earthworm that lives in the ground. How do they spend their days and nights? What do they eat? How long do they live? Do they think? Do they have a sense of humour?”

Most people slow down as they age, but not Earle. She spends more than 320 days a year travelling around the world, lecturing, diving, meeting scientists, speaking to world leaders, working with communities on the front lines of climate change, and exploring parts of the ocean most people will never see—not that she sees her extensive travel as taking her from one place to another. “It’s only one place. It’s all Earth. It’s one planet,” she says. “Anywhere you go, there are familiar threads—the trees are different but related, the birds belong to the same families. As soon as we got on the boat here in Thailand, [I noticed] there were white egrets standing in a salt marsh. It looked like home, because there are white egrets back in Florida, and here, and around the world. Everything connects. It may seem as if I’m going to different places, but it’s all one place. Our home.”

And just as she sees the planet as a single living system, she views the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Southern Ocean and the Arctic Ocean as a singular, continuous body of water shaping life everywhere. “[They’re] all connected,” she reiterates, a belief born of a lifetime observing currents, species, and human impacts rippling across the globe.

Despite her obvious passion, Earle’s path to science was not straightforward. As a young girl, she was told it was not realistic for her to imagine a future as a scientist.  “It certainly was expected that I’d get married and have children and run a household. If I really wanted to be adventurous, I could be a teacher, a nurse or a flight attendant—but I couldn’t be a pilot or a doctor. It was just not expected that women should do those things back then.”

But Earle refused to relinquish her ambitions. “If you really want to do something, don’t let others steal your dream,” she says. Her resolve carried her to pioneering feats, including being the only woman among 70 men on a research expedition to the Indian Ocean in 1964—a time when women were rarely offered opportunities to partake in long‑duration scientific voyages at sea—when she was 29. “It was six weeks at sea and people thought it was exceptional, and I guess it was—but it didn’t seem that way,” she recalls. “I was there to do the job. I wasn’t there as a woman, I was there as a scientist.”

In 1979, Earle set the world record for the deepest untethered solo dive, descending 381m to the ocean floor in an armoured atmospheric diving suit. Her love of exploration and her dedication to ocean conservation continued to shape her career, leading to the founding of Mission Blue in 2009.

It was during another one of her trailblazing adventures—the Tektite II project in 1970, where Earle led an all‑female team that lived underwater for two weeks—that her relationship with Rolex began. On that occasion, she received a Lady Datejust that became her faithful companion in and out of the water for years to come. In 1982, she was named a Rolex Testimonee in recognition of her extraordinary achievements as well as commitment to ocean exploration and conservation. Since 2014, Rolex has been supporting Mission Blue in helping to increase the number of Hope Spots from 50 to 168, spread across 55 million km2, and advancing the United Nations‑backed global goal of protecting 30 per cent of the world’s ocean by 2030. Some Hope Spots, such as the Nusa Penida Marine Protected Area in Indonesia, have achieved strengthened protection in just the past year. Others are in the process of being safeguarded thanks to the momentum the Hope Spot movement has built.

“I love working with Rolex because it shares the optimism and the conviction that we do have time, but not a lot, to use what powers we have to reverse the decline of the planet,” Earle says. She raises her wrists to show us the two Rolex watches she has been wearing together throughout the trip—an Oyster Perpetual Datejust on her left and an Oyster Perpetual Submariner Date on her right. “I’ve come to respect not only the quality and beauty of the watches, but also the quality and the beauty of the company itself—dedicated to excellence and to supporting people in sports, music, science, conservation and beyond. When I started Mission Blue in 2009, Rolex was one of our earliest supporters with the Hope Spots.”

Earle often reminds people that “the ocean generates more than half the oxygen in the atmosphere. It took hundreds of millions of years to build Earth’s life‑support systems—and only decades to unravel them.” Yet, she is far from a defeatist. “Look in the mirror,” she says. “Ask yourself: what power do I have? What do I care about? What can I do that can make a difference?”

This difference, Earle notes, can be made by doing something as small as picking up rubbish on a nearby beach, because even the simplest actions can spark others to act. She expounds: “You see somebody doing something and it looks like fun, or simply the right thing to do—maybe you want to help too. Somebody starts a war and people pile on; but it works the other way as well. Kindness can be contagious.”

Still, she says, “not enough people care, because they don’t know. That’s the big gap. If they truly understand the importance of protecting the natural world, not just for its own sake but for their own survival and prosperity, it changes everything. We need the planet to prosper, so we can prosper. And the more we harm it … the more we set ourselves on a trajectory we don’t want. We need to take care of the systems that take care of us. We have not been doing a good job. Enough is enough. It is time to change.” Understanding, she adds, inspires action: “When people see the consequences of what they do, they’re more likely to do the right thing.”

Earle believes we stand at a threshold: now is the first time we can truly see the harm we have done, and the first time we can choose differently with a complete understanding of the situation. While the damage unfolded before we had the science or the tools to perceive its scale, satellites can now observe bleaching reefs from space while underwater robots observe coral polyps. “We have the power to destroy and the power to heal,” she says. “But it’s based on knowing.”

She cites the late English primatologist Jane Goodall’s four reasons for hope: the human mind, the human spirit, nature’s resilience and the next generation. Elaborating, she says: “The human mind is uniquely capable—we know what other creatures cannot. Technology cuts both ways, but it can empower us to care and act. The human spirit drives us to protect one another, the past and the future. Nature is resilient: we’ve taken a lot, but we can still breathe, still recover. And the kids today already know more than I did at their age; they have the potential to act with urgency and imagination.”

But optimism, she insists, must be paired with immediacy. As she puts it: “Fifty years from now, we may look back at this time and say, ‘Bravo—just in time, we made the right choices and built the future we really want.’ Or we may look back and realise we failed to do what needed to be done. We need to make important changes—not to nature, but to ourselves.”

Having devoted more than six decades—and counting—to marine exploration and conservation, Earle is living and breathing that philosophy, embodying the changes she has spent a lifetime advocating. Even at 90, Her Deepness is still travelling more than 320 days a year, still diving, still teaching, still believing, still actively reshaping global ocean conservation—living proof that age is not a barrier to the unwavering pursuit of an enduring passion.

Under the Same Sky

Tatler believes that true luxury lies in preservation—in safeguarding the beauty of our world for generations to come. Guided by culture, community and creativity, Under the Same Sky shares the stories of those working tirelessly to preserve the health of our planet. These intrepid explorers, organisations and scientists and entrepreneurs are supported by the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, and we are excited to share their innovations and ideas that will hopefully help sustain life on Earth. This is our shared commitment to ensure that the habitability of our planet endures—timeless, vital and everlasting.

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