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60 stories for“dive safety”
DAN warns that remote liveaboard incidents rose sharply in 2024-2025. Divers can reduce risk by checking oxygen, drills, charging rules, exits and evacuation plans before sailing.
Aug 2, 2026
Research divers work under formal scientific diving safety standards, but a marine science background does not make deep or technical diving inherently safer to attempt.
Jun 14, 2026
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
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
Spearfishing shares its breath hold physiology with freediving, but a hunting mindset changes the risk calculation entirely, and blackout remains the top cause of death.
Apr 8, 2026
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
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
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
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
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
Compact geography, shore access, wrecks and a new six-person hyperbaric unit make Gozo an unusually practical Mediterranean base for a mixed-experience dive trip.
Jul 25, 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
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
CO2 tables build genuine breath hold tolerance over weeks. Hyperventilating beforehand does the opposite of what beginners think it does, and it has killed trained divers.
Sep 2, 2025
Most divers carry something sharp and have never once deployed it underwater. The gap between owning a cutting tool and being able to use one in the dark, with one hand, is where people die.
Aug 12, 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
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
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
After six divers died in a Vaavu Atoll cave, the Maldives is drafting new rules to permit and regulate technical diving in the country for the first time in its history.
May 28, 2026
The same reef becomes a different site after dark, and so does the diving. Navigation, buddy contact and the way your brain handles a narrow beam all need rethinking before you get in.
Aug 8, 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
A woman and her partner, both long-serving members of the European technical community, did not survive an emergency ascent near Ueberlingen on 2 August. The cause is still unknown.
Aug 5, 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
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
Shark bites made headlines again in 2025. The numbers behind those headlines tell a very different story for the people actually diving with sharks.
Mar 5, 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
Egypt's most famous sinkhole is also its most argued-over dive site. What the Blue Hole actually is, and why so much depends on who is diving it.
May 20, 2024
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
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
A sunken ship draws every diver's curiosity, but the line between a safe swim-through and a genuine penetration dive is stricter than it looks.
Jun 25, 2025
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
Older than PADI, structured as a non-profit membership association, and built on a principle almost nobody else uses: the instructor may exceed the standards, and is expected to.
Aug 12, 2026
Overweighting is the most common equipment error in freediving and the one with the worst failure mode. The rule is simple: neutral at ten metres, positive above it, and the surface is where it matters.
Aug 11, 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
Finnish cave specialists, Maldivian coast guard divers and DAN Europe medics carried out a coordinated recovery after the Vaavu Atoll cave tragedy.
May 22, 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
The numbers every diver recites are not arbitrary and they are not a safety margin invented by lawyers. They come from a specific set of chamber trials, and knowing their limits tells you when to wait longer.
Aug 15, 2026
Diving emergencies far from shore involve costly medical evacuations and coordination. Here is how that response is actually funded and organised, and who calls the shots.
Jun 25, 2026
Budapest and Novi Sad staged world championships nine days apart under rival federations. Four AIDA world records fell, then CMAS records fell again, often to the same athletes.
Aug 4, 2026
The agencies argue endlessly and the accident data barely distinguishes between them. Here is what genuinely differs, what does not, and the questions to ask a dive centre before you pay.
Aug 13, 2026
Submersion triggers an ancient reflex that slows the heart, redirects blood, and quietly reshapes what a trained freediver's body can survive underwater.
Sep 18, 2024
An Open Water card opens the door to diving worldwide, but it is a narrower licence than most new divers assume. Here is exactly what it covers.
Sep 9, 2025
One demands breath control and stillness, the other demands equipment discipline. Here is what separates them and where beginners should start.
Jun 24, 2025
Frenzel and mouthfill solve the one problem that stops more beginner freedivers than fitness or fear ever does: equalising the ears under rising pressure.
Dec 5, 2024
Divers call it the bends. Doctors call it decompression sickness. Here is what nitrogen bubbles actually do to tissue, and how hyperbaric treatment reverses it.
Feb 14, 2024
Scuba Schools International built its model around the store rather than the individual teacher, gave its digital learning away, and quietly became the main alternative to PADI in most of the world.
Aug 12, 2026
One Maldivian military diver died in the Vaavu Atoll mission. His service deserves gratitude, while the unanswered questions surrounding his death still demand scrutiny.
Jul 25, 2026
The Philippines' remote World Heritage reef rewards careful planning with walls, sharks, turtles and a conservation model built around a short liveaboard season.
Jul 25, 2026
Coughing pink after a deep dive is not something to shrug off. Squeeze happens when tissue cannot keep up with pressure, and the usual causes are tension, forcing equalisation and pushing depth too fast.
Aug 13, 2026
Raja Ampat remains one of diving's richest destinations, but current, season, permits and mounting pressure from tourism and mining belong in the booking decision.
Jul 25, 2026
Global Underwater Explorers standardises equipment, teaches in teams, tests fitness, and hands out provisional passes rather than certificates. It is the most divisive system in diving, and the most internally consistent.
Aug 12, 2026
The east coast has the depth, the Gulf side has the pools, and summer changes the answer entirely. A practical guide to training here across the year rather than flying to Dahab every time.
Aug 13, 2026
HEAD rescued Aqualung out of receivership with a 50 million euro package. The result is a single group holding four of diving's best known equipment names and SSI, the agency that certifies divers to use them.
Aug 18, 2026
The records look impossible until you learn what the body does when the face hits cold water. Most of the gain is physiological adaptation and relaxation, not lung size, and one record category is not comparable to the others.
Aug 11, 2026
Deep water a short swim from shore, no boat, no current and warm all year. Dahab's geography explains its status, and the same geography is why the Blue Hole has the reputation it has.
Aug 9, 2026
Two tables, two different adaptations, and a hard rule about where you do them. One trains tolerance to discomfort, the other trains efficiency at low oxygen, and confusing them wastes weeks.
Aug 12, 2026
Technical diving begins the moment a diver can no longer go straight to the surface. Here is how training builds toward that shift, one course at a time.
Dec 5, 2025
