Between 1969 and 1972, 12 people (all of them men) walked on the moon, took an afternoon stroll 240,000 miles away. Around this same time, Sylvia Earle, the first chief scientist for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, was just learning to dive deep below the surface of the sea. Back then the tempertature of the earth was about one degree cooler than it is today, coral reefs were thriving, and we still thought of the ocean as “too big to fail,” Earle said in a lecture on May 22 to kick off the first annual Sustaining Coastal Cities conference, an event hosted by the College of Science.
A “living legend” according to the Library of Congress, Earle first became enamored with the sea as a kid when she read a book by William Beebe, the man who developed the first underwater breathing system, which he and Otis Barton used to plunge themselves a half mile down.…