A VISIT FROM
Aquababe number one Also known as Her Deepness, Sylvia Earle has lived for weeks at a time on the seabed, given her name to marine forms, and dived deeper and more often than practically anybody else on Earth. This month she comes to britain with a message that all is not well in the world's oceans, thanks to mankind

Colleagues affectionately call Dr Sylvia Alice Earle "Her Deepness". And American publications have dubbed her "Queen of the Deep", among other highly complimentary titles.

Sylvia Earle makes light of them all, but there is absolutely no doubt that she deserves them. For this diminutive, attractive, highly articulate and passionately committed lady from New Jersey, USA is, among her other remarkable underwater accomplishments, the world's deepest woman diver. In 1979, for instance, she made the world's deepest solo dive, a record of its kind that still stands. Contained in the one-atmosphere armoured diving suit JIM, she was strapped to the front of a small research submersible and taken 385 metres down off Hawaii. Untethered, she then walked the seabed for 21/2 hours.

At that time, only submarines had reached that depth, and she was later to say that what she saw amazed her - including coral that pulsed with blue light, sharks 18 inches long, and fish with little lights "that cruised by like miniature ocean liners".

But Sylvia's love affair with the underwater world began much earlier than that, as did the amazing record of her achievements. At the age of 16, when her family moved to the west coast of Florida, she had the Gulf of Mexico on her doorstep, and spent much of her time cataloging the plants and animals in the water.

Aiming for a degree in botany, she wrote a thesis on the algae of the Gulf, started a collection of marine life samples, and now has 20,000 of these. Using early examples, she is now able to identify changes in the marine habitats of the Gulf, which today adds to her worries about the future of life in the sea.

Her teenage studies were quickly to earn her a Bachelor's degree from Florida State University, then a Master's degree from Duke University.
snip