This Marine Biologist Is A Frickin’ Badass And She’s Saving Our Oceans

The marine biologist has done things in the ocean that would scare most people senseless.

She’s been alone in total darkness thousands of feet down, hovered under a Russian ship as it pinged her submarine, and been charged by huge sharks. But one thing does frighten her: the dire state of our overfished and polluted seas, something she spends every waking hour trying to change.

In her lifetime, she has seen the ocean damaged in ways humans never thought it could be.

The ongoing disaster leaves her mournful, desolate, and sometimes scary to talk to.

Since her first dive, in a sponge-diver’s helmet in a Florida river when she was 16, she has spent 7,000 hours, or the better part of a year, underwater.

In the depths, swordfish and bioluminescent fish and humpback whales in midsong have swum by her, done a double take, and stopped to check her out.

From her life’s experience, she has become no longer really terrestrial. She is like a super-apex sea creature that has somehow wound up on dry land and is walking around and telling everybody about the terminal ruin humans are inflicting on her home.

So, can Sylvia Earle save the oceans?