EXPLORE | ARTIFACT
THEY’RE HUMBLE plastic-and-rubber
dive fins, aged by hundreds of hours
of exposure to salt water and sun—
but they’ve been on great adven-
tures. That’s because their owner is
the barrier- breaking, record-setting
oceanographer Sylvia Earle.
As a student of marine science in the
1950s, Earle adopted scuba equipment
early on. She was the first woman to
enter a lockout chamber of an underwa-
ter submersible (and was four months
pregnant at the time); she led the first
all-woman aquanaut team to live
underwater for two weeks. In 1979 she
descended 1,250 feet in a pressurized
suit to walk on the ocean floor off Oahu,
setting a record for the deepest dive
made without a tether. On land Earle,
a National Geographic explorer-in-
residence, was the first woman to be
chief scientist of the U.S. National Oce-
anic and Atmospheric Administration.
How many pairs of fins has Earle
gone through in her decades of sci-
entific research? No one has an exact
count. Nowadays she prefers a more
high-tech fin design, a type also favored
by U.S. special forces. The military’s
fins are black, though, while Earle’s are
a luscious red. She calls them her “ruby
flippers.” —NINA STROCHLICFINS THAT HAVE
A PLACE IN HISTORY
PHOTOGRAPH BY REBECCA HALEITEMS IN THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
ARCHIVES INCLUDE FAMOUS FOOTWEAR.
THESE BELONGED TO SYLVIA EARLE.Earle used these
fins during some
of the roughly
8,000 hours she’s
spent underwater.