The bizarre consequences of a warming world can no longer be ignored.
Every California diver I know has a recent story about when they first noticed things were changing at our local dive sites. Some recall their local kelp bed looking thin, while others mention the presence of yellowfin tuna on every shore dive, the range extension of a Mexican nudibranch or the appearance of a skinny baby sea lion on the swim step of their dive boat. For me it was when a three-metre-long smooth hammerhead shark curiously bumped my camera rig. It was August 2014, and it was no secret that the surface waters were a few degrees warmer than normal.
On that day the swell and wind were formidable, but we were determined to get offshore. We hoped to get a good look at the hammerhead sharks typically a subtropical species that had been spotted at the surface by one or two multiday dive boats over the past few weeks. We couldn’t believe our luck when one showed up and interacted closely (at times, very closely) with us for three hours.
Among divers the rumoured cause for the oddities of the summer of 2014 was El Niño (the warm phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation), an ocean-atmosphere interaction in the east-central equatorial Pacific that strongly influences ocean conditions and weather patterns. However, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had not confirmed the presence of El Niño conditions. Meanwhile, Washington state climatologist Nick Bond had already come up with an alternate name for the odd patch of warmer-than-usual ocean off the coast of the Pacific Northwest: “The Blob.” This phenomenon, thought to be the result of locally persistent high pressure that inhibited normal wind-driven oceanic upwelling and cooling, had spread along the West Coast and encompassed multiple stretches of ocean from Alaska to Mexico.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة Issue 05 - 2016 من Scuba Diver.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
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هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة Issue 05 - 2016 من Scuba Diver.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
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From The Medical Line: Diving After DCS
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101 Tips On Becoming A Better Tek Diver
Technical diving takes divers beyond the typical recreational scuba diving limits, opening up many new and exciting possibilities.
TECHNICAL DIVING TIMELINE (1660–1999)
It’s fair to say that the emergence of “technical diving” in the late 1980s, that is, the introduction of mixed gas technology, and later mixed gas rebreathers to the sport diving community, represented the culmination of hundreds of years of scientific discovery and technological development.
FLYING AFTER DIVING
From the Safety Stop
DIAGNOSING DECOMPRESSION ILLNESS
Incident Insight