Tubbataha Is the Dive Trip You Plan a Year Ahead
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

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60 stories for“gas planning diving”
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

A diver's surface air consumption rate looks like a fixed fact. It is a moving average that depth multiplies and stress inflates, which is why reserves exist at all.
Oct 16, 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

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

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

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

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

Enriched air extends no-decompression limits at recreational depths by reducing the nitrogen you take on. It also imposes a hard ceiling on how deep you can take it, and the claim about post-dive fatigue has never held up.
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

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

The Maldives is not one dive destination but hundreds of atolls with different currents. Here is how the calendar actually decides what you see.
Aug 9, 2024

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 dive computer tracks pressure and time with precision, but the model behind it cannot see the diver wearing it. Here is what that gap actually means.
Mar 19, 2026

Below 50 metres, ordinary air becomes a liability for divers. Here is the physics behind nitrogen narcosis, rising gas density, and why trimix exists as the technical diving standard.
Jun 8, 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

In the late 1980s, teaching recreational divers to breathe enriched air was close to heresy. IANTD taught it anyway, then built the trimix and rebreather syllabi much of technical diving still runs on.
Aug 12, 2026

NOAA teams outplanted corals at 66 meters during a 2026 Gulf mission. The work shows how advanced diving and laboratory science can restore difficult deep habitats.
Aug 2, 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

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

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

Sami Paakkarinen, Jenni Westerlund and Patrik Grönqvist received Italian state honours for a recovery mission defined by preparation, restraint and humanity.
Jul 25, 2026

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

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

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

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

The Indian Ocean hosts some of diving's biggest animal encounters. The rules for approaching them properly matter more than most divers realise.
Sep 12, 2025

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

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

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

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

One demands breath control and stillness, the other demands equipment discipline. Here is what separates them and where beginners should start.
Jun 24, 2025

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

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

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

An expert report for Italian prosecutors lists anoxia as the cause of death for the five divers lost in a Vaavu Atoll cave in May. Why they ran short of gas is still unanswered.
Oct 6, 2026

University of British Columbia researchers combined dive surveys with genetic analysis to describe a red-eyed, three-lipped species that grooms itself with comb-like legs, and a second with an hourglass abdomen and black eyes.
Sep 26, 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

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

Almost every fatality report ends with drowning, which tells you nothing. Investigators use a four-part chain instead: trigger, disabling agent, disabling injury, cause of death. Here is how to read one.
Aug 12, 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 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

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

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

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

Technical diving instructor Adam Jacoub died on 18 July 2026 following a dive in Hurghada, Egypt. The circumstances remain under investigation.
Jul 20, 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

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

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 French submarine at 36 metres, a 1939 freighter at 40, and a Victorian battleship far beyond recreational limits. Lebanon's coast is a wreck list before it is a reef.
Aug 6, 2026

New resorts, new dive licences and a scaled-back masterplan. Here is the real state of Saudi Arabia's Red Sea diving push, not the pitch deck version.
Feb 10, 2026

Sonar and underwater video surveys of the Benin continental shelf found octocorals and reef fish thriving 54 metres down, the first confirmed living mesophotic coral community documented anywhere on the Gulf of Guinea shelf.
Sep 29, 2026

The fourth global coral bleaching event hit 84 percent of the world's reefs. Here is what that means underwater, and what responsible diving looks like now.
Jun 18, 2026

Glasses do not fit under a mask, so the default answer is contact lenses. Eighty-five per cent of cases of a rare blinding corneal infection occurred in lens wearers who swam or dived in them, and there is a better option most divers never price.
Aug 20, 2026

Tanks, troop carriers, anti-aircraft guns and a helicopter sit in ordered rows off Aqaba. It is the world's first underwater military museum, and the reasoning behind it is economic.
Aug 6, 2026

A wetsuit that fits badly is a wetsuit of any thickness that does not work. Match millimetres to the water, check the fit at the neck, the small of the back and the wrists, and know which neoprene you are paying for.
Apr 7, 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

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
