Night Waves - Sylvia Earle

Matthew Sweet meets one of the world's best known and respected oceanographers, Dr Sylvia Earle. A former chief scientist of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Dr Earle has taken part in more than half a century of ocean exploration. She came to worldwide fame in the 1970s, when she led the first team of women aquanauts to live in an enclosed habitat on the ocean floor, and she continues to hold the record for solo diving to a depth of 1,000 metres. In addition to her continuing underwater exploration, Dr Earle is vocal on the role the oceans play in maintaining life on the planet - including one tiny photosynthetic organism that is estimated to provide the oxygen in "one in every five breaths we take" - and she advocates the creation of marine protected zones across the globe. She talks to Matthew Sweet about her life and work as a marine scientist, her response to the recent Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and what she describes as "the greatest era of planetary exploration in all of human history". This is the latest in Night Waves series of extended interviews with leading scientists from Britain and the rest of the world, given as part of the BBC's year of science programmes in 2010.