"What's the wreck we're heading for?" I asked. I had never dived a shipwreck before. Something about the swinging boat; the fried breakfast and the fearsomely cold and inhospitable conditions made me wonder if I really wanted to. We were still thirty minutes out and the skipper was offering us a cup of tea. I declined. Read More >>

This is incredible. Unlike the shark attracting light suits of Tron-surfing or the glowing outline of night skiers, seeing a wakeboarder with a light board is like seeing Picasso with a paintbrush. The tricks the wakeboarders pull makes for a visually magnetic picture. It's like painting rainbows! Read More >>

Here's a wonderfully colourful photo project by photographer Robert Weingarten which shows how psychedelic our world can get. Weingarten took a photo at 6:30 in the morning of the same view of Santa Monica Bay from his home in Malibu for an entire year. Even with all that sameness, each photo captures something completely different from before. Read More >>

When humanity's not trying to destroy itself, its steadily redefining its boundaries. Every passing year, we create further-flung outposts in places nature never intended to us to inhabit. Here are the loneliest places mankind has made its bed in search of the unknown, the overwhelming, and the great. Read More >>

GoPros are well-known for being robust. I mean, we've seen one fall out of a plane and land intact. This GoPro was keen on going on its own adventure as well, except in the water instead of the air. Read More >>

You're going to watch this video and your jaw will drop. In fact, you'll probably think it's fake. Or CGI, at least. But nope, it's completely real. A group of guys went fishing and dropped a GoPro Hero 2 camera inside a custom-made torpedo to record the ocean underneath them. What the camera recorded was the most amazing footage of dolphins you'll ever see. Read More >>

Everyone knows the names Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. At the dawn of the space age, another frontier was under exploration, too—although it never had the fanfare or funding that the astronauts received. Read More >>

The Aquanauts had killed the power and strapped on their emergency air masks. Someone smelled burning. In a rich-oxygen environment like Aquarius, fires can spread with ferocity; any hint of combustion is taken with utter seriousness. The air wasn't circulating as it was supposed to, and, up above, the life support buoy sounded like it was going to explode. Instead of a steady, even hum, the generator sounded like something between a between a bark and like it was gagging. Read More >>

Otto Ruttan got married to Leanne in the Aquarius Reef Base on March 26th, 1996. They met at Aquarius during his first day on the job. She was a marine biologist doing aquanaut training and he, being the new guy, was assigned to count laps during the swimming drill. Read More >>

You think carrying your shopping up your 2nd-floor flat is a pain in the ass? Try bringing that stuff into an undersea base without it getting soaked. How do you do it? The answer is surprisingly low-tech: pressure pots. Read More >>

You can see it from the surface of the water: a blue outline 50 feet down. Aquarius. The last undersea base. Diving down to it is like falling slowly into another world. Read More >>

The coolest kid at the beach would come sporting this water toy—a float with a periscope attached. But what everyone wants to know is if they could make it for adults too. Read More >>

So, you want to become an aquanaut? Do you have the right stuff? What is the right stuff? Do you even know what an Aquanaut is? Read More >>

Two days ago, in the ocean a few miles off Key Largo Florida, I watched a woman dive 20 feet down to a sandy bottom. Conch skittered across sea floor while fish pecked at a nearby reef. A Barracuda snuck up behind me and glittered as it passed by. Then, an odd thing happened. The woman on the sea floor stopped swimming, grasped her neck with both hands and a large cloud of air—it appeared to be an entire lung full—escaped from her bright yellow steel dive helmet. The bubbles scattered the fish. Then, the stream of air stopped entirely. Read More >>

Though they weigh as much as 60,000 tons, the massive semi-submersible oil rigs dotting the Gulf of Mexico can still sink when faced with a hurricane's onslaught. And there's only one way to pull the rigs' 7,500 ton decks off the seafloor after such a catastrophe — with America's heaviest-lifting ship, the VB 10,000. Read More >>