Sea Explorer Jacques Cousteau Dead

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PARIS: Died: Jacques Cousteau, who brought the fantastic, muticolored undersea world of ice formations, shipwrecks and just plain mackerel to America's television masses, after more than 60 years of underwater exploration. "Jacques-Yves Cousteau has rejoined the World of Silence," the Cousteau Foundation succinctly announced, leaving unstated the cause of the 87-year-old oceanographer's death. As a child, Cousteau was notable for his passion for breaking high school windows. As an adult, after completing France's prestigious Naval Academy, he poured that energy into inventing the aqualung, building the first manned undersea colonies, and floating for more than 40 years over the sea floor in The Calypso, a refitted mine-sweeper from which Cousteau shot the first color footage of life in the deep. For the wiry, red-capped Frenchman, exploring every nook and cranny of every ocean on the globe for such hugely popular television series as "The Underwater World of Jacques Cousteau" came as easily as love at first sight. "When you dive, you begin to feel that you're an angel," he explained in a recent interview. "It's a liberation of your weight." Thanks to Cousteau, even diehard landlubbers could float, if only briefly, like angels, too.