Women Who Protect the Oceans - Part I: The Pioneers
- Jana Gombošová
- Oct 15
- 12 min read
The ocean has known women’s strength since ancient times. And it’s not just the legendary Japanese pearl divers - ama, or the South Korean “women of the sea,” the haenyeo, whose history stretches back hundreds or even thousands of years. Women have also made waves in the realms of science, discovery, and conservation. What unites them all is one thing: the determination to go deep.
Throughout history, women have always had to work harder to prove themselves in a man’s world - even when their courage and perseverance were just as strong. In the 20th century, they began diving deeper than ever before - not only into the water but also into the depths of science, discovery, and knowledge that had long been reserved for men. At a time when they weren’t even allowed aboard research vessels, they chose to fight for their place, or simply build their own. And not just ships, but submarines. Their curiosity became their driving force, and the sea, their second home.
Rachel Carson: The Scientist Who Awakened the World
Rachel Carson (1907-1964) never needed an oxygen tank to dive into the ocean - a pen was enough. To her, the sea was a living organism, and perhaps that’s why she could write about it in a way no one else ever had. She grew up in rural Pennsylvania, far from the coast, yet the ocean called to her with irresistible force. After studying biology at the Pennsylvania College for Women and Johns Hopkins University, she joined the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, where she began writing popular science articles about the ocean and its life. In 1951, she published The Sea Around Us, which immediately became a bestseller and earned her international recognition - not because it shocked readers with discoveries, but because it blended fact with beauty. “The rhythm of the sea is never ending - the tide, the birth and death, the light and darkness. These are the pulses of one planet,” Rachel wrote.
Carson showed the world that the ocean is not just a space for fishing or scientific research, but a living system that keeps the Earth in balance. She was among the first to write about climate connections, the oxygen cycle, and the fragile link between the ocean and humanity. Her greatest work, however, was Silent Spring, published in 1962. In it, she warned about the destruction of nature by chemicals, pesticides, and human indifference. The book sparked a global awakening - it marked the beginning of the modern environmental movement and indirectly led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). “One must learn to feel wonder, for only those who feel wonder will never want to destroy,” wrote the woman who launched the environmental movement decades before ecology became a common word.
Lotte Hass: The First Lady of Diving
Lotte Hass (1928 - 2015) was born in Vienna, and her path to the ocean was anything but straightforward. She worked as a secretary for Hans Hass - later her husband - an Austrian oceanographer and pioneer of underwater research and filmmaking. At that time, no one expected her to ever put on a diving mask. In the 1950s, women simply didn’t belong on research vessels. It was said they brought bad luck and distracted the crew. But when a crew member fell ill one day, Lotte convinced Hans that she could take his place. Despite doubts and resistance from the men unwilling to accept “a woman underwater,” she quickly became part of the team.
Lotte learned to use heavy oxygen equipment - long before modern regulators existed - and mastered the challenges of pressure, depth, and marine life surrounding her. Most importantly, she took a camera with her. Together with Hans, she filmed groundbreaking underwater documentaries in the 1950s, such as Unternehmen Xarifa (1954) and Abenteuer im Roten Meer (1951), among the first color films to reveal life beneath the surface. For many viewers, it was the first time they saw a coral, turtle, or ray not as a static illustration but in motion - alive.
Lotte showed that the ocean is not a place of fear, but of life - that the silent world has its own rhythm, its own light, and its own poetry. Her perspective was different from the male gaze: gentle, observant, and deeply perceptive. At a time when the underwater world was described in the language of war - “expedition,” “conquest,” “catch” - she introduced the language of wonder. Audiences watched her films with bated breath, sensing that what they were seeing was not just a documentary, but love. She later became an inspiration for generations of women divers and an icon in the history of diving, not for breaking technical records, but for opening the doors of the underwater world to the public.
Marie Tharp: The Woman Who Mapped the Invisible World
Marie Tharp (1920 - 2006) was a geologist and cartographer who allowed humanity to see the ocean in a completely new way. She revealed a world that, until the mid-20th century, was as unknown as the surface of the Moon. While men sailed the seas without truly understanding them, Marie worked in the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, poring over sonar readings printed on endless rolls of paper.
She wasn’t allowed on research vessels - women still were not permitted aboard, so she “mapped” the oceans from her desk, using a pencil and graph paper. Every point she transferred from sonar profiles to her maps represented an echo from the Atlantic seafloor. Thousands of points, millions of tiny data traces. And among them, a pattern no one else had noticed, but Marie did. She realized that a long, continuous rift ran through the center of the ocean, not random but connected. She called it the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
Her hypothesis was bold for its time. She claimed that Earth’s crustal plates were moving apart, that the seafloor was spreading, that the planet was alive. When she told her colleague, he dismissed it: “That’s just your woman’s imagination.” But Marie had evidence - and eventually, the whole world proved her right.
Her maps became the foundation for confirming the theory of plate tectonics - one of the most important scientific discoveries of the 20th century. She showed that the ocean floor was far from flat; it was a dramatic landscape of mountains, valleys, and fractures where new crust was being formed. In 1977, after decades of painstaking work, she collaborated with artist Heinrich Berann to create the iconic World Ocean Floor Map, a visual masterpiece that united science and art. Within its deep blue contours lies not only the topography of our planet but also humanity’s enduring curiosity and drive to understand.
Marie Tharp changed the way we perceive the ocean. Before her, it was seen as an empty space between continents. After her, we know it as a dynamic, living system - a place where the planet continually renews itself.
Eugenie Clark: The Shark Lady
Eugenie Clark (1922-2015) grew up in New York, but her soul always belonged to the sea. As a young girl, she spent hours at the aquarium, mesmerized by sharks. While others saw danger, she saw wonder. It was there she decided that one day, she would meet them in their own world. After World War II, when diving was still a daring adventure rather than a common sport, Clark began exploring the ocean - observing, sketching, measuring, and taking meticulous notes. She earned a PhD in ichthyology and devoted her career to studying shark behavior, at a time when sharks were dismissed as nothing more than “predatory machines.”
In 1955, she founded a small research station in Florida called Cape Haze Marine Laboratory, which later became Mote Marine Laboratory - now one of the world’s most respected marine science institutions. It was there that Eugenie Clark began studying sharks in ways never done before. She demonstrated that they could learn, associating sounds or visual cues with rewards. She even trained some species to distinguish between simple shapes and light signals. Her experiments revealed that sharks possess memory and the ability to adapt to their surroundings. At a time when the very idea of fish intelligence was ridiculed, her discoveries were groundbreaking.
On one of her expeditions, Eugenie Clark made a discovery that completely changed how scientists understood shark behavior - the phenomenon of “sleeping sharks.” In underwater caves along the Yucatán coast in the Gulf of Mexico, she found sharks resting motionlessly on the seafloor. Until then, it was widely believed that a shark would suffocate if it stopped swimming, since it needed constant water flow through its gills to breathe.
Eugenie proved otherwise: some species, such as the Caribbean reef shark (Carcharhinus perezi), can breathe while still by slowly pumping water through their gills.
She shared her discoveries with the public with remarkable ease. She didn’t need to shock her audience, she spoke about beauty, complexity, and respect. Her popular books, such as Lady with a Spear and The Lady and the Sharks, opened a window into a world that had long been seen as dark and dangerous.
Clark was never afraid of the ocean’s predators. Not because she lacked fear, but because she never saw sharks as threats. As she often said, the real danger lies in how little we understand and how much of the ocean is disappearing before we even notice.
Sylvia Earle: Her Deepness
Sylvia Earle (born 1935) is known to the world as “Her Deepness.” And not just because she has spent more time underwater than almost anyone else on the planet, but because she truly understands it. When she moved to the coast of Florida as a young girl, the ocean immediately captivated her - a love that never stopped growing.
She studied botany, but soon became far more fascinated by what grew beneath the waves than on land. As a young scientist, she joined some of the first underwater expeditions in the 1960s - at a time when women were only just beginning to be tolerated aboard research vessels. But Sylvia didn’t come to watch quietly. She came to see everything.
Over the course of her career, she has led more than a hundred expeditions and personally descended to depths once reserved for men. “Down there,” she says, “you realize that Earth truly is a blue planet. Everything we do on land depends on what happens in the ocean.”
Earle went on to become the first woman to serve as Chief Scientist of NOAA - the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Yet even while leading major institutions and research teams, her greatest strength has never been politics - it’s her ability to tell the ocean’s story.
Sylvia never waited for technology to catch up with her curiosity. She actively helped design deep-sea submersibles and mini-submarines that allowed scientists to venture to places where only machines had gone before. In 1970, she led the Aqua-Lab (Tektite II) mission - the first underwater research expedition composed entirely of women who lived for several days beneath the sea. A few years later, she descended alone to a depth of more than 300 meters in one of the first experimental JIM diving suits, completely unconnected to the surface. “Beneath the waves,” she said, “there is no silence. It’s a world that breathes, moves, and speaks, just in a different language.”
In 2009, she was awarded the prestigious TED Prize, which allowed her to launch her visionary project Mission Blue, a global initiative uniting scientists, divers, filmmakers, and conservationists in the effort to protect the ocean. Its main goal is to create Hope Spots - places of hope. These are not just points on a map, but living sanctuaries where life concentrates: coral reefs, seagrass meadows, mangrove forests. Places that can still maintain balance, if we give them a chance.
Katy Payne: The Woman Who Heard the Songs of Whales
Some people see the world through their eyes, others through their ears. Katy Payne (born 1937) belongs to the latter. Her gift wasn’t diving beneath the surface, but listening to it - not to the sound of waves, but to the rhythm hidden beneath them.
Katy studied both biology and music, two disciplines that rarely intertwine. Yet it was precisely this combination that made her a pioneer who transformed how we understand whales. In the 1960s, she worked with her husband, biologist Roger Payne, studying the acoustic communication of marine mammals. At the Cornell laboratory, she analyzed endless recordings of low-frequency sounds. What she heard wasn’t random noise - it was melody.
Together, they discovered that male humpback whales sing, and that their songs have structure, repetition, rhythm and evolution. They change from year to year. New motifs spread across populations, as if whales were passing their music along to one another.
In 1970, they released the album Songs of the Humpback Whale, which became a turning point. For the first time, humanity could hear the ocean - not just see it. Thousands of people around the world listened and realized that deep beneath the surface, there existed culture. That the creatures once hunted for oil had their own language, emotions, and beauty.
These recordings helped spark the global Save the Whales movement, one of the most successful environmental campaigns in history. The music of whales became an anthem for the ocean.
Later, Katy Payne discovered that elephants communicate in a similar way, using infrasound, low-frequency tones inaudible to humans. She coined the term “acoustic empathy” - the ability to perceive the world through vibration rather than words.
Today, she is known as the woman who opened the planet’s ears. In an age when underwater noise from ships, drilling, and sonar disrupts whale migration routes, her recordings carry new meaning. They remind us that if we stop listening, we lose our connection to the world that keeps us alive. “Every note of a whale’s song,” Payne once said, “is proof that communication doesn’t belong to humans alone, that intelligence takes many forms, and that we, who claim to be its peak, must learn to listen.”
Valerie Taylor: The First Shark Conservationist
When the Australian filmmaker Valerie Taylor was born (1935), the underwater world was still largely unexplored. As a teenager, she overcame polio, but her desire for movement and freedom led her to the ocean and to diving. Valerie soon became one of the finest underwater photographers of her time - not because she had the most advanced equipment, but because she had a rare gift: she knew how to see.
Her signature look was a ribbon in her blonde hair. But the “Barbie” appearance was deceiving, Valerie was always a fearless and determined explorer.
Together with her husband, Ron Taylor, she dove into depths where no one had ever filmed before. In the 1960s and 1970s, when sharks symbolized fear for the public, they captured footage that showed something entirely different: trust.
In 1973, they became the first people to film a great white shark without a cage. It was just them, the water, and the animal - curious, not aggressive. Valerie often said that sharks can sense when you’re not afraid of them, that in the ocean, there is no aggression, only reaction.
Her images and documentaries transformed the way people viewed these ancient creatures.
The Taylors also took part in filming Jaws, but the movie’s massive success, and the wave of hatred toward sharks it unleashed - pushed them both to take action. They deeply regretted their involvement, never imagining the consequences it would have. From then on, they fought to change the narrative of the “killer from the deep,” becoming outspoken advocates for shark conservation.
Valerie Taylor emerged as one of the world’s most passionate defenders of sharks. She campaigned against their hunting, for the creation of marine sanctuaries, and for restrictions on shark finning. Through her films and photographs, she achieved what few campaigns could - awakening empathy.
Each of these women changed the world in her own way - but together, they gave the ocean a stronger voice. Their stories opened the door for those who came after them - the next generation of explorers, conservationists, and scientists.
You’ll meet them in the second part of the blog: Women Who Protect the Ocean - Part II: The New Wave. (comming soon)
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Sources: :
Women Divers Hall of Fame (WDHOF) – Member Profile: Lotte Hass
Encyclopedia of Diving History – Hans and Lotte Hass: Pioneers of Underwater Exploration
Austrian National Library Archives – Hans and Lotte Hass underwater films, 1950s
BBC Archives – Obituary: Lotte Hass, First Woman Underwater Filmmaker (2015)
Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium – Our History / About Dr. Eugenie Clark
Smithsonian Magazine – How the “Shark Lady” Changed Our View of These Misunderstood Creatures (2018)
National Geographic – The Shark Lady’s Legacy: Eugenie Clark and the Caves of the Sleeping Sharks (2015)
Florida Museum of Natural History – Dr. Eugenie Clark profile
Marine Biological Laboratory Archives – Eugenie Clark and the Study of Fish Behavior (1950–1980)
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – Digital Media Library
Library of Congress – Rachel Carson Photographs and Letters Collection
The Atlantic – The Woman Who Launched the Modern Environmental Movement (2012)
The New Yorker – Silent Spring at 50 (2012)
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – Legacy of Rachel Carson
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University – Marie Tharp: The Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor
US Geological Survey – World Ocean Floor Map (1977)
National Geographic – Marie Tharp’s Ocean Floor Map Changed Geology Forever (2019)
NOAA Ocean Explorer Archives – Mapping the Ocean Floor: The Work of Marie Tharp and Bruce Heezen
Mission Blue – Official site & press kit
NOAA – Women in Oceanography: Sylvia EarleTED Prize – Sylvia Earle’s 2009 Wish to Protect the Blue Heart of the Planet
National Geographic – Sylvia Earle: Hero for the Planet (2010)
Ocean Exploration Trust – DOER Marine and Deep Submergence Technology
Australian National Maritime Museum – Ron & Valerie Taylor Collection
National Geographic Documentary Films – Playing With Sharks (press materials)
Wikimedia Commons – Valerie Taylor 2019 photo by Eva Rinaldi (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The Guardian – Valerie Taylor: Shark Wrangler, Conservationist, and Pioneer of Underwater Filmmaking (2021)
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