Women Pioneers of Underwater Exploration

Introduction

The history of diving is often told through a canon of male explorers. But women have been central to underwater science, exploration, and conservation from the beginning. Here are eight of the most consequential.

Eugenie Clark (1922-2015)

Known as 'the Lady with the Sharks,' Eugenie Clark was an ichthyologist who spent her career studying shark behaviour and cognition at a time when sharks were reflexively portrayed as mindless killing machines. Her research at the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory in Florida (founded 1955) demonstrated that sharks could be trained, had complex learning capacities, and occupied specific ecological niches. She published over 175 scientific papers. Her 1953 book Lady with a Spear made her famous outside academia and helped shift public perception of marine science as a field women could enter.

Sylvia Earle (b. 1935)

Sylvia Earle has logged more than 7,000 hours underwater, led over 100 expeditions, and served as NOAA's first female chief scientist. In 1979 she completed a Jim suit saturation dive to 381 metres off Oahu — a solo tethered walk on the seafloor that remains one of the deepest untethered dives by a woman. She founded Mission Blue, the organization focused on establishing marine protected areas worldwide. Earle's advocacy work has probably done more for marine conservation than any other individual in the field.

Valerie Taylor (b. 1935)

Australian diver and filmmaker Valerie Taylor, with her husband Ron, was one of the first people to dive extensively with great white sharks without a cage. The underwater footage they shot in the early 1970s was used in Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975). Taylor later became one of the shark's most vocal conservationists. She also documented the first underwater footage of the Coral Sea's reefs in the 1960s.

Zale Parry (1933-2020)

In 1954, Zale Parry set a women's depth record, diving to 209 feet (64 metres) off Catalina Island in California. She was a technical advisor on the television series Sea Hunt (1958-1961) and became one of the sport's most visible early advocates for making scuba accessible to women.

Lotte Hass (b. 1928)

Lotte Hass accompanied her husband, Austrian diving pioneer Hans Hass, on his research expeditions beginning in the 1940s and appeared in his groundbreaking underwater films including Diving to Adventure (1951) and Under the Red Sea (1952). While Cousteau received the bulk of international attention, Hans and Lotte Hass were documenting underwater life in the Red Sea and the Caribbean before Cousteau's Calypso expeditions began.

Alenka Artnik (b. 1985)

Slovenian freediver Alenka Artnik holds the women's world record in constant weight freediving at 116 metres, set at Vertical Blue in the Bahamas in 2021. She trained under the system pioneered by Russian freediver Natalia Molchanova (who disappeared during a dive in 2015). Artnik's records represent the outer edge of what human physiology can achieve on a single breath.

Cristina Zenato (b. 1969)

Cristina Zenato is a shark conservationist and diver based in the Bahamas who is known for her work with Caribbean reef sharks — she has spent decades hand-feeding and interacting with sharks at a site in Grand Bahama, demonstrating their capacity for individual recognition and non-aggression toward known humans.

The Haenyeo of Jeju Island

No list of women underwater pioneers is complete without acknowledging the haenyeo of Jeju Island, South Korea — an all-female diving community who have been free-diving for abalone, conch, and sea cucumber for over 1,500 years. Diving without equipment to depths of 20 metres in water as cold as 10 degrees C, the haenyeo represent the longest continuous tradition of women in underwater practice in the world. UNESCO recognised their culture as an Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2016.