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“medication 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two depth marks fell at the AIDA world championships in Cyprus, one in constant weight for men and one in free immersion for women. Both still await ratification.
Oct 10, 2026
