By Nick Visser, Source: Huffington Post

Dr. Sylvia Earle has spent more than 7,000 hours — nearly a year of her life — underwater. So when she says the oceans are in trouble, you listen.

“Misson Blue,” a new documentary released by Netflix, follows the 78-year-old Earle and her life as one of the country’s leading oceanographers, from her fierce defense of the sea to her charge to protect everything that lives within it. The project has been in the works for more than three years after directors Robert Nixon and Fisher Stevens set out to create a film inspired by Earle’s 2009 TED Talk, in which she asked the world to help protect the “blue heart” of the planet.

More than 12 percent of all the terrestrial land on Earth is currently protected, but less than 1 percent of the oceans are afforded the same safeguards as they remain under siege from threats ranging from rising seas and acidification, to overfishing and increased temperatures. Earle told The Huffington Post she hopes the film, and her ongoing conservation efforts, will help open the public’s eyes and re-establish a respect for scientific fact — and sooner rather than later, as it “takes a lot to even make the slightest impact, the slightest ripple in the way people think.”

Read the rest at: Huffington Post