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Biography of Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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Source: Cousteau Society

According to Jacques-Yves Cousteau,
"The reason why I love the sea, I cannot explain. It's physical. . . . When you dive, you begin to feel that you're an angel. It's a liberation of your weight." Jacques Yves Cousteau devoted much of his life to exploring the world’s oceans and defending ocean life.

Many people believe that Cousteau was the world's most famous oceanographer. He was born in Saint-Andre-de-Cubzac France in 1910. He was educated at the Naval School in Brest, France. When he was in the French navy he began his underwater explorations. In 1943 he and French engineer Emile Gagnan perfected the aqualung, a cylinder of compressed air connected through a pressure-regulating valve to a face mask, enabling a diver to stay underwater for several hours. It led to the modern SCUBA . Later he invented the one man, jet-propelled submarine.

Cousteau made full-length films, film shorts, and numerous television films which won many prestigious awards. Cousteau wrote many books that have been translated into a dozen languages, including a series entitled "Undersea Discoveries of Jacques-Yves Cousteau". Cousteau’s 60-year-long odyssey on the Earth’s seas, much of it on his famous boat, the Calypso, was more than a great adventure. After he led a 1972 voyage to Antarctica, a world-wide television audience saw, for the first time, the extraordinary beauty of sculpted ice formations under the sea. In 1974 he started the Cousteau Society, a not-for-profit environmental education organisation in the United States, to protect ocean life.

He also visited the Amazon in 1985 to study the rivers and rainforests. The Amazon River was big enough for the Calypso to sail upriver and to serve as the base for Jacque Cousteau and his team of divers. The man who brought us to the depths of the ocean died at the age of 87 in 1997.

Check that you understand what these words mean in this document
To devote: to give all of something, especially your time, effort or love, or yourself, to something you believe in (or to a person).
To defend: to protect.
Prestigious: greatly respected and admired.
Voyage: trip.
Extraordinary: very special.

For further information visit:
http://www.dolphinlog.org/
http://www.cousteausociety.org/
http://www.cousteau.org/
http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9706/25/cousteau.obit/