Earle is one of the most esteemed oceanographers on the planet. She’s spent more than 7,000 hours underwater over more than 100 scientific expeditions. In 1970, Earle shot to global fame by spending two weeks living on an undersea research facility as part of the groundbreaking Tektite II expedition; in 1979 she was appointed the first female chief scientist of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Since 2009, Earle’s organization Mission Blue, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, has helped to identify special places worldwide, dubbed “Hope Spots,” that are critical to the health of the ocean. There’s a reason she’s known as “Her Deepness.”
But this time, in the Cayman Islands, things were different. When she saw the reef, Earle says, she gasped. “The reefs were shades of brown, marked with large white spots that turned out to be bleached coral. It was mostly dead,” Earle says. “There’s fish there, but not very many, and there were no big fish.”
The world’s oceans are at a tipping point. After several years of increasing temperatures and rapid acidification—a major trigger of coral bleaching events—the world’s oceans hit a record temperature high in 2023. The change has dire implications for the climate, as well as ocean biodiversity. At the same time, sea life is under growing threat from industrial overfishing, noise pollution, and tourism; according to the Marine Conservation Institute, less than 3 percent of the ocean is adequately protected.
“It’s taken so long—billions of years of fine-tuning—to create a living planet,” Earle says. “It’s taken us a remarkably short period of time to undo it. In my lifetime, in David Attenborough’s lifetime, in Jane Goodall’s lifetime. We are witnesses to the most dramatic decline of the planetary systems that make Earth habitable for life as we know it—and humans are the cause.” But, Earle says, “knowing we’re the cause means we have the power to be the solution.”
Such optimism is typical of Earle, and powers the success of Mission Blue. “I think part of what resonates with Mission Blue and Hope Spots is that there's hope. It encourages people to understand that nobody can do everything, but everyone can do something,” Earle says. “We're now attracting champions, communities, and corporations, with that positive message. Even with all the doom and gloom that's out there—and there's plenty of it—we've grown now, we have 160 places with Champions.”
Sylvia Earle has been a Rolex Testimonee since 1982; in 2014, Mission Blue partnered with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative to promote marine conservation. “The support that Rolex has given helps us to conduct expeditions in Hope Spots, and to elevate the young scientists, explorers, and communicators,” Earle says. The wider community of explorers and scientists backed by the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative has also helped bring collaborators to the project, such as the bioacoustics researcher and Rolex Award for Enterprise Laureate Michel André, who recently nominated a new Hope Spot in Villanova, Spain. “Together, it’s a network of hope,” Earle says. “It’s a network of power.”
Earle uses her expertise to lobby on behalf of the oceans, particularly against the risk of deep-sea mining, which environmental campaigners believe will be devastating to ocean ecosystems. In March 2023, the United Nations agreed on wording with the High Seas Treaty, a landmark international agreement aimed at hitting a target of protecting 30 percent of the world’s oceans by 2030. (Although 67 nations have signed it, key signatories remain.) The UK, France, Germany, Spain, and New Zealand are among several nations trying to prevent deep-sea mining. Despite this, in January 2024, Norway became the first country to approve the controversial practice.
“The real problem is that the miners are not compelled to tell the truth. They say, ‘There’s nothing down there.’ But that’s just not true,” Earle says. “The deeper we go in the ocean, the less we know. But the more discoveries we’re seeing, the more we know the value of [keeping] that intact. Vast wilderness is so much greater in terms of the importance to us, in stabilizing planetary processes.”
At the same time, Earle wants to combat the rapid growth of industrialized fishing. Some commercial fish stocks have plummeted by 90 percent in recent decades; Earle is one of many activists calling attention to the damage caused by the overfishing of keystone species like Antarctic krill, which large fish and mammals rely on as part of their food cycle.
“Look at the numbers since the 1950s. More than half of the tunas, swordfish, cod, herring, squid, you name it—they’re in real trouble, because we have fleets of subsidized industrial fishing vessels that go from pole to pole, and [fish] depths of the ocean that have never before been accessible,” Earle says.
Even the way we talk about fish stocks, Earle explains, shows how we view the ocean as something to be extracted. (“You wouldn’t talk about ‘elephant stocks,’” she says.)
This isn’t just about our diets. “I'm not going to tell you what to eat. Certainly, if you ask me, I'll say that eating ocean wildlife is probably not in your best interest, or in the planet’s.” It’s more fundamental—it’s about larger planetary lifecycles and carbon cycles. “Every fish, every squid, every shrimp, and planktonic microorganism, they're all part of the carbon cycle. And at the same time that we are pouring millions of tons of trash, garbage, and plastic waste toxins into the ocean, we're taking out of the ocean hundreds of millions of tons of wildlife that are part of that carbon cycle. It’s a biodiversity issue, and a climate issue.”
To Earle, much more work is needed on agreements to stem the tide of industrialized fishing and deep-sea extraction, in addition to formalizing safeguards for Marine Protected Areas like her Hope Spots project. With the support of Rolex, Mission Blue is trying to ensure that marine ecosystems are not lost to future generations but more action is required. “We need the engagement of governments, and we need the engagement of leaders of corporations and organizations globally,” she says.
Even so, she remains hopeful. That recent dive to the Cayman Islands, for example? That wasn’t the end of the story. “Right at the base of some of these really stark white mountains of coral, there’s a little patch of perfectly healthy, robust, colorful coral of the same species that was still there somehow—which speaks to the importance of biodiversity. Not all of the corals were dead. Given a chance, they have the potential for populating the changed ocean. And although I did not see any big groups of fish, I saw small ones. I did not see large parrot fish, but I did see some babies. All of these things, you know, it wasn't completely dead. There's still 10 percent of the sharks in the ocean, they're not all gone. You know, I could get really depressed about that, but I refuse to give up, because they still have a chance, and that means we have a chance.”
To find out more about Rolex and its Perpetual Planet Initiative, visit rolex.org, and explore our Planet Pioneers partnership page here.
