Blue Latitudes

I was honored to be joined by Emily Hazelwood and Amber Sparks, the co-founders of Blue Latitudes, a certified women-owned marine environmental consulting firm. Before starting Blue Latitudes in 2015, Hazelwood and Sparks started their careers on opposite sides of the country. Hazelwood’s career began at Connecticut College where she obtained her B.A. in environmental science. In 2011, she worked on the BP 252 Oil Spill where she witnessed firsthand the devastation and destruction of oil spills. It was here, however, that she learned of a unique silver lining in this mercurial industry: the Rigs to Reef program. Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, Sparks started her career at UC Berkeley where she obtained her B.A. in marine science. A former Ocean Curator at Google, Sparks engineered and launched intelligent layers in Google Earth and Google Maps to relate complex ocean concepts to a variety of audiences. When their timelines finally converged at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, something awesome was bound to happen. And it did: Blue Latitudes. What started as a graduate school capstone project has developed into the premier Rigs-to-Reefs firm, repurposing offshore platforms as thriving reefs worldwide and using our patent-pending software, FishLAT, to deliver scalable, data-driven solutions that transform how the offshore industry approaches a sustainable future.