Marine biologist · First female chief scientist, NOAA · National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence
b. 1935 · NOAA 1990–92 · Mission Blue founded 2009
“No ocean, no life. No blue, no green. No ocean, no us.”
Sylvia Earle, TED · Mission Blue.
Sylvia Earle — "Her Deepness" — is the most accomplished female ocean explorer of the modern era. She led the first all-female team of aquanauts in the Tektite II programme (1970), set a world record in 1979 by walking untethered on the sea floor at 381 metres (a record that still stands), and from 1990 to 1992 served as the first female chief scientist of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She has logged more than 7,000 hours underwater, descended in dozens of submersibles, and is the subject of the Netflix documentary Mission Blue (2014).
Earle founded Mission Blue in 2009 — a network identifying "Hope Spots," critical ocean ecosystems that the global ocean-conservation community pushes governments to protect. As of 2026 the Hope Spots network covers more than 150 sites and has been instrumental in the designation of many of the world's most important Marine Protected Areas. She is a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, a Time magazine "Hero for the Planet," and one of the most consequential ocean scientists alive.
Earle has dived from Cousteau's Calypso, from the Schmidt Ocean Institute's Falkor, from Dalio's Alucia and OceanXplorer, and from her own submersibles built through Deep Ocean Engineering — Deep Worker, Deep Rover, and Deep Search.
Earle is the moral compass of the modern ocean. Any private yacht programme that wants to be taken seriously as an ocean platform has to be able to look her in the eye. Wind Voyage was built with that test in mind.
If ocean voyaging is something you’d like to pursue, we have developed a way to do it using wind and solar power out of our respect for the oceans.
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