The power of the island of Ponza lies in its ability to preserve an intangible aura of magic, which nature has given it, in the marriage of heaven and earth, water and fire, in the racing of land and sea after each other, relentlessly.
The RF3 Proceedings have been published in both print and electronic format following the safety symposium held from 18 - 20 May 2012 at the Caribe Royale Hotel in Orlando, Florida. Two years in the planning and two years in the writing, the 324-page rebreather publication showcases state-of-the-art and science of rebreather diving through the experience and knowledge of some of the world’s leading specialists in education, operations, physiology, medicine and safety. This meeting followed the Rebreather Forum 2 conference which was held in 1996.
Spotted at the recent TekDiveUSA conference, Nardi Compressori’s TT-Mixing panel (photo at right shows near identical N-Mix) produces ready trimix gases simply by keying the blend on the touchscreen.
At the beginning of World War I the German submarine U-26 disappeared without a trace.
On October 11, 1914, she sank the Russian cruiser Pallada inflicting the first loss of the war on the Russian navy. The boat did not return from sea in August 1915 and is assumed to have struck a mine or suffered a technical failure off the coast of Finland.
The Finnish group of divers who goes by the name Badewanne states on their website:
The animals tagged for this study exhibited profound diving capabilities; however, the dive depths and durations reported here far exceed the prior records for this species. The deepest dive of 2992 m.
Diel patterns in dive behaviour were strongly evident in this dataset, confirming previous observations from short overnight deployments that this whale spends significantly more time in waters above 50 m at night than they do during the day.
Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey found that although female humpback whales have crossed from one hemisphere to another at certain times in the last few thousand years, they generally stay in their ocean of birth.
This isolation means they have been evolving semi-independently for a long time, so the humpbacks in the three global ocean basins should be classified as separate subspecies. This has implications for how we think about their conservation and recovery on a regional scale.
“Further genetic sequencing and analysis should also help us to understand more about the pattern of humpback migrations in the past. Big changes in the ocean can leave signatures in the genetic code of marine species. For example, the last glacial maximum caused many to shift southwards until the ice retreated or to find ice-free areas in the north.
Humpbacks are excellent oceanographers; they go where the food is and can travel long distances to get it, so their patterns of past migration can tell us a lot about the ocean thousands of years ago.”
The Baltic Sea offers some very treacherous waters even under the best of circumstances. The price to pay for sailing the Baltic through the millenniums has been high, and traces of those costs are scattered over the bottom.
A difficulty in obtaining information about wild animal behaviour is that detailed observations of different individuals is necessary over long periods of time, and this is especially hard to achieve with sharks. But in the shallow lagoons of French Polynesia, such observation was possible without the encumbrance of scuba gear, and without the problem of the shark disappearing into the depths.
Miles of white sandy beaches, family vacation destinations, infamous spring break festivities and outstanding state parks attract millions of visitors to Florida annually from around the world. But there is so much more to see—especially for those who like to take their sightseeing down below the ocean and gulf waters—like the beauty and magic of thousands of artificial reefs that lie beneath the surface along Florida’s coastlines.
Online Seminars for Underwater Photographers.
In August 2012, I wrote an article which discussed just culture and what this meant in the context of recreational and technical scuba diving, and using this concept, how we can improve diving safety.
Barely beaten tracks are an increasingly rare find for travellers in this ever more accessible world. Yet on the shores of Tomini Bay on the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi, one such place still exists.
