7/2/2023 0 Comments Hidden water cavern iowaWe're barely even beginning to document these new species. On the unusual creatures she has encountered in underwater cavesĬaves are filled with remarkable life forms that we barely understand. So it's really all about controlling emotions and controlling your breathing. Like, the big picture of survival is sometimes so hard to see, but we always know what we can do to make the next best step towards survival. So I take a really deep breath and try and slow my heart, slow my breathing and then just focus on pragmatic small steps. You start to breathe fast, your heartbeat starts to race, and you have to turn that all off. It's like your emotions want to take over. When something terrible happens, it's really easy for your mind to just explode into these, like, chattering monkeys. On how she remains calm when things go wrong on a dive If we'd been in there, we would have been killed. So the cave we had just been inside was now gone. onto the deck to see the very iceberg we had just been inside of cracking and dissolving and breaking up into just slush ice on the surface of the ocean as far as the eye could see. When that piece of ice calved and blocked the doorway, it nearly threw them out of the boat and they were sitting up there assuming that we were dead.Īnd as we sat there eating our meal, suddenly I heard a scream on deck and we went running up. ![]() And I looked up and I could see my colleagues on a zodiac boat waiting for us, and they were like high-fiving and dancing, and apparently it was much more dramatic from their viewpoint than from mine. ![]() And I remember sitting there, about 20 feet below the surface, just doing a hang for what we calledĭecompression time at the end of the dive, just to allow my body to re-acclimate to the pressure. We worked our way around, in between blocks of ice, and found a new route back to the surface. There'd been a calving, and a massive piece of ice had blocked the doorway out.Įcco "Nobody had had ever attempted to cave dive inside an iceberg," Heinerth says of her expedition in Antarctica. But when we turned around to retrace our footsteps and come back out, we got to a point where we could swim toward the surface, toward daylight, and I realized that the doorway - the very opening that we had gone into to get into the iceberg - had closed. We were diving beneath this iceberg and we were well into these passages when I was hearing cracks and pops and groans and all sorts of sound from the ice, and in the moment I didn't realize what it was. So when this broke away from the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica and started to make its journey north, it started breaking into pieces along fractures and crevasses that we were able to exploit and swim inside of, to find tunnels within the ice and tunnels beneath the iceberg where it had sort of tripped up on the seafloor. And this iceberg was not just the largest moving object on the planet, but it was the size of Jamaica. Nobody had had ever attempted to cave dive inside an iceberg. So there are a lot of environmental factors at play - none of which we could have predicted, because nobody had written a handbook for something that hadn't been done before. As it's melting, you get freshwater dropping into saltwater, and that actually also creates really weird up currents and down currents. ![]() In the ocean you have significant tidal exchanges, but there are a lot of things that are happening around an iceberg. On diving inside an iceberg in Antarctica Heinerth is also a writer, photographer and filmmaker who has starred in TV series for PBS, National Geographic Channel and the BBC. "But I envision myself solving each one of those, and sometimes I'm actually, like, moving my hands and reaching for a valve or a button or whatever to solve each of those issues, so that when I get in the water my mind is really free." "I actually think about what would kill me today," she says. Then she sits down, closes her eyes and imagines all the horrible things that could happen. I take a really deep breath and try and slow my heart, slow my breathing.īefore every dive, Heinerth goes through extensive safety checks on all of her gear.
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