Oceans of Opportunity

Category: the Life Aquatic | an Evolution

CNN the Sixties | the Space Race

While I’m not much of a television buff, I’ve been taken by CNN’s ‘The Sixties’, particularly the recent release of Episode 7: the Space Race. Two elements were particularly captivating: 1. The real ‘race’ in the effort with Russia, and the sense of American pride that was attached to various space program propaganda to drive…

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see ya latah, alligatah

Diving isn’t always pristine coral reefs, calm seas, and a relaxing day at the beach. In fact, most days – for those of us living the life aquatic – it’s anything but. From sewers to koi ponds, there are and forever will be the need for people to get down and dirty to unclog pipes,…

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extended range extensions

While it seems like only yesterday, the pursuit of ‘extended range diving’ as it was then defined about two decades ago was very basically understood as the technique used to dive just a bit deeper than conventional recreational diving. It meant strapping on a set of double cylinders, pushing the limits of using air as…

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another ‘S’ word – streamlining

There’s something inherent in diving, and technical diving in particular, that draws us to a degree of obsession about equipment. Even those who prefer the more organic aquatic intervention of freediving, particular attention is always paid to the best fitting suits, masks, and so on. In the end, we all rely on at least the most…

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Atlantis is Rising

Surely that post title caught your attention – and no, its not some propagandist hoax from the back of a tabloid. This is the real deal. The site, www.spiritscience.net recently released a piece describing 5 beautiful underwater cities – and these do indeed exist, or at least what remains of these cities that were once swallowed…

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6 months of decompression

With the blink of an eye, it had been six months since I had last been in the water. The last time I had been dry for that long was over a decade ago, but under very similar circumstances – that is taking the necessary time to incubate a new idea and take steps towards…

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the consumer machine, mass conformity, and a new lfie in the sea

My weekend started with a task not too foreign to me in recent years – filling a 10 yard dumpster outside of my middle-class suburban home as we get the ball rolling with a basement renovation project. I asked myself, yet again, “where does all the garbage go?” Now, I certainly do not pretend to have…

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a ‘flood’ of insight about our past, and our future

There are a few stories that make us all stop for  a moment and contemplate the realities of the world we live in. One of them is the flood, as in THE flood. Recent archaeological finds in Iraq revealed a cuneiform tablet that references what may likely be a 4000 year old version of the…

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on world views, and ‘overviews’

Having spent the last twenty days  living and working within the surreal dimension of the island nation of the Solomons, I’ve had ample time to reflect on the underwater experience afforded from this pristine part of the Pacific‘s coral triangle. It’s difficult to call any field experience like this ‘routine’, though in many ways it…

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Rising Seas – where should we go?

The September 2013 issue of National Geographic Magazine includes a beautifully developed and presented feature about ‘Rising Seas’ – the imminent threat of sea-level rise due to a variety of factors. The cover page includes a series of questions addressed in the article which read as follows: 1. What will we protect? 2. What will…

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