Big Sur is the place that brought John Steinbeck, Henry Miller, Ansel Adams and Robinson Jeffers to their knees. Any one of the elements is overwhelmingly impressive on its own: the killer cliffs pitched to the Pacific; the creased hills; the redwoods; the thick, gray knots of the cypresses; the rocky balconies from which one may look down on eagles; the naked, stranded rocks; the steep and carpeted Santa Lucia Mountains; the tide pools; the life in the tide pools.

"It was here at Big Sur that I first learned to say Amen!" wrote Henry Miller. From the Point Sur Lighthouse, Earle looks out at a long breath of fog over the water and says, "I love life."

She is a small-boned, fearless woman with a kid's keen face, deep brown eyes set far apart, and a jaw of character, like the young Katharine Hepburn's. Sometimes the alertness in her eyes and the quick, broad smile are disconnected. At the age of 63, she is at the bottom of her field--scientist, explorer, advocate. This year she is explorer-in-residence for the National Geographic Society, which has a $5 million grant from the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund to launch the five-year Sustainable Seas Expeditions project. As its leader, Earle will use a new, highly maneuverable submarine to study the waters of the 12 national marine sanctuaries.

She was captain of the first team of women to live beneath the ocean's surface; the five aquanauts spent two weeks in an underwater laboratory off the U.S. Virgin Islands in 1970. She has gone on at least 50 expeditions and spent more than 6,000 hours undersea, including a record-setting solo descent to 3,000 ft. in a submersible craft known as Deep Rover. In the 1979 dive that gave her the royal nickname, she became the mirror image, and the equal, of the moonwalkers.