Description
Scuba diving is an amazing experience, truly transformative and meditative, a life-changing activity for many divers. It’s nothing short of addictive, but in a good way. You hover weightlessly above the ground, like in the most fantastic lucid dream, and a slight flick of a fin – which transforms your terrestrial primate foot into a marine mammalian fluke – gets you gliding towards that amazing coral bommie to your left or the school of yellow-striped snappers to your right.
Besides the unique bodily experience of weightlessness, scuba diving is also a great social activity, and many friendships and romantic relationships have been formed on dive boats.
Of course, another amazing aspect of scuba diving is the possibility to witness fantastic natural environments, habitats that were almost completely inaccessible to humans before scuba equipment was developed and popularized 60 or so years ago. It’s truly enthralling to witness reef sharks glide above groups of butterflyfishes and wrasses foraging between the finger and plate corals. The colours, shapes, the dance-like motions of reef fishes of all sizes are a stunning spectacle, and anyone who has learned some biology to understand how the many reef organisms interact with each other will be even more fascinated by the vivid scenery seen on a healthy coral reef.
Now, we don’t want to rain on anyone’s scuba parade, but to us, as professional marine biologists, it looks like the future will sadly have much fewer dive sites with thriving multi-coloured coral reefs with clear water and myriads of gaudily shaped and patterned reef fishes.
Diving will still be great, we believe. But the oceans will be different, and divers will often have to have different expectations. Sometimes divers will see dive spots that were hit by one of the many environmental problems Homo sapiens is causing to the planet’s oceans. But, as Henry Rollins once sang, Sometimes happens all the time.
Not only does our book aim to serve as mental preparation for divers who encounter stressed parts of the ocean, we also incorporate the use of dive briefings and dive site reviews to explain the causes and consequences of each problem faced by the ocean. We hope to give a realistic view of the stresses the oceans are experiencing, in a form that’s fun to read (despite the severity of the problems) and easily digestible for everyone who has ever snorkelled or scuba dived. Some of the included environmental problems are harder to solve than others, but none are solvable if not enough people know about them. So read along, enjoy the dives, and if possible, do your part to help save some of the best wet parts of the planet.
Finally, we hope you enjoy our humorous style. We have the impression that a sense of humour has somewhat gone out of style in this day and age. We think that being entertaining and seeing life, including life underwater, not dead-serious, all the time, is a sign of maturity and a good way to convey information, like this book aims to do. For that end, we have also included some science fiction dives, happening in starships and on far-away moons. The main aim of these dives is to entertain, but we manage to squeeze in some environmental thoughts into these chapters as well.
Happy Reading and Happy Diving,
Dr. Klaus M. Stiefel, Dumaguete, Philippines
Dr. James D. Reimer, Okinawa, Japan
December 2022
Twenty-five future dives
Klaus M. Stiefel
James D. Reimer
Environmental problem dives:
- Nuclear waste dive
- Ocean acidification dive
- Coral bleaching dive
- COTS dive
- Overfishing dive
- Plastic dive
- No more sharks dive
- Invasive species dive
- Aquaculture dive
- Land reclamation and armored coastline dive
- Tropicalized dive
- O2 deficit dive
- Sea level rise dive
- Fish on drugs dive
- Genetic engineering dive
Sci-Fi dives:
- Generation Starship dive
- Europa ice dive
- Terraformed Mars dive
Endgame dives:
19: The unhappy end: business as usual dive, 20 years into the future
- The unhappy end: business as usual dive, 100 000 years into the future
- The very unhappy end: World War III dive
- The very, very unhappy end dive: No more humans dive, 20 years into the
future
- The very, very unhappy end dive: No more humans dive, 100 000 years into
the future
- The happy end: Humanity weaned itself off fossil fuels and boundless
economic growth ocean dive
- Asteroid impact drift dive
