How Competitive Freediving Made Itself Safer, Metre by Metre
Safety divers, counterballast lines and strict medical protocol turned a high risk sport into one of the most closely supervised in the water.
Mar 11, 2025

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60 stories for“AI safety”
Safety divers, counterballast lines and strict medical protocol turned a high risk sport into one of the most closely supervised in the water.
Mar 11, 2025

Divers Alert Network is not a training agency and issues no certifications. It collects the injury data, then publishes guidance based on it. Here is that guidance, in the order it matters.
Aug 12, 2026

Below about 15 degrees a thick wetsuit keeps a diver alive but not warm, and cold is a safety problem before it is a comfort one: it thickens judgment, wastes gas and makes the hands useless. The drysuit is a different way of diving, not a thicker suit.
Feb 4, 2025

Three minutes at five metres is drilled into every diver and explained to almost none of them. It is not decompression, it is not required, and skipping it is not the emergency people assume.
Aug 9, 2026

The PROTECT package treats drowning as a systems failure involving childcare, transport, infrastructure, rescue and climate preparation, not a single bad choice.
Jul 23, 2026

Divers who silt the bottom, burn through gas, struggle to hold a safety stop and finish cold usually share one cause. They are carrying too much lead, and every other symptom follows from it.
Sep 5, 2026

Lionfish, stonefish, stingrays and most jellyfish deliver venoms that heat breaks down. The standard measure is immersion in fresh water as hot as you can stand without burning, capped at 45 degrees, for thirty to ninety minutes.
Sep 2, 2026

Scuba has real hazards, but recreational diving within training and conditions is a managed-risk activity, not the extreme gamble suggested by rare accident headlines.
Jul 25, 2026

A good briefing answers most of what a visiting diver needs. A great diver asks the rest: current, exit, turn pressure, lost-buddy plan and what happens if the boat cannot find you.
Sep 18, 2026

Two agencies now certify divers to dive alone, with redundant gas and a long list of prerequisites. The case for it rests on an uncomfortable observation about how often the buddy system already fails in practice.
Sep 5, 2026

DAN is a name every diver knows, but membership and dive accident insurance are not the same thing. Here is what each one actually buys you.
Jun 30, 2025

When a diver surfaces with decompression sickness, a hyperbaric chamber is the only real fix. Here is how recompression works, and where chambers actually are.
Nov 18, 2024

Two men and a woman surfaced from a dive at Canyon Reef, found no boat, and were carried kilometres out. Whether lost divers are found has surprisingly little to do with the search itself.
Aug 18, 2026

DAN's annual diving reports track how divers die each year, and the leading cause is rarely the dramatic equipment failure popular imagination assumes it to be.
Jun 19, 2026

Cave diving safety rests on a small set of hard rules built from decades of accident analysis. Here is what those rules are and why the sport enforces them so strictly.
Jun 2, 2026

Redeemer Grima, 41, was working 30 metres down at a fish farm off St Paul's Islands when he drowned. His equipment was later found lodged in the mouth of a dead bluefin tuna.
Aug 12, 2026

At the Asian Freediving Cup in Panglao, the Hawaii-based American pulled herself to 106 metres and back on one breath, matching a mark Natalia Zharkova has held alone until now.
Aug 3, 2026

Shallow water blackout does not warn its victim first. Here is the physiology behind it, why it strikes trained divers, and why solo breath hold diving is never safe.
Jun 10, 2024

The standard aluminium 80 is negatively buoyant full and positively buoyant empty, which is why safety stops go wrong at the end of a dive. Steel behaves differently, and the valve and testing rules differ too.
Sep 5, 2026

Drift diving turns a dive from a route into a ride. The techniques that make it safe are mostly about the surface and the boat, and the mistake that kills people is trying to fin against water that is stronger than they are.
Sep 5, 2026

A cave in the Maldives, a lake in Germany, an inlet in Florida, a tuna farm off Malta. Four very different events, and a short list of factors that shows up in nearly all of them.
Aug 13, 2026

A small genre with a heavy subject. These are the documentaries and features that actually explain the sport, including the ones that handle its deaths honestly rather than as spectacle.
Aug 11, 2026

The current constant weight world records, the athletes behind them, and the federations, AIDA and CMAS, that ratify every metre added to the books.
Jan 15, 2026

Five Italian divers and a Maldivian rescuer died in May. A manslaughter file is open in Rome, a liveaboard lost its permit, and the Maldives is writing technical diving law. A follow-up assessment.
Aug 12, 2026

Descent equalisation is drilled into every open water student. Reverse block, where expanding gas cannot escape the middle ear or sinus on ascent, gets a sentence in the manual and is considerably harder to manage.
Sep 5, 2026

Five Italian divers died in a Maldives cave near Vaavu Atoll on 14 May 2026, and a Maldivian rescue diver died during the search that followed.
May 15, 2026

Tides follow the moon, not the season. Spring tides are the big ones, slack water is not always at high or low tide, and the hour that matters for a dive or a swim is the one the tables show for your own coast.
Sep 23, 2026

Oxygen keeps divers alive, until pressure turns it toxic. Here is why central nervous system oxygen toxicity shapes every gas decision in technical diving.
Sep 10, 2024

Malta, Chile, Norway, Scotland. Different species and different regulators, the same short list of causes: entanglement, working alone, depth creep, and a job nobody classified as commercial diving.
Aug 12, 2026

Nitrogen narcosis dulls judgment before a diver notices anything is wrong. Here is why depth impairs decision making, and why self-diagnosis often fails.
May 22, 2024

The world's deepest pool holds 14 million litres at a constant 30C, with a sunken city at the bottom. What it removes from diving turns out to be the interesting part.
Aug 6, 2026
