On June 23, 2018, twelve members of the Wild Boars, a youth soccer team based in the jungled mountains of northern Thailand, and their young assistant coach parked their bikes in the mouth of Tham Luang Cave after practice. The cave network was dry when they entered, but as they traveled more than a mile on foot into its dark, dank limestone recesses, a monsoon descended. It was the first major storm of the wet season, and it caught everyone on the ground by surprise. There was no time for officials to close the cave, and by the time they found the boys’ bikes, Tham Luang was already flooded.

The subsequent 18-day search and rescue operation was an unprecedented collaboration involving Thai government officials, Thai Navy SEALs, members of the U.S. Air Force, local farmers, Thai hydrologists and engineers, and, most famously of all, . The entire country of Thailand tuned into this story from day one. Although it appeared the boys were almost certainly dead, the nation held out hope. Once the boys were found alive, hundreds of reporters and thousands of volunteers from around the world joined the scrum outside the cave, and millions of people across the globe became invested in the boys’ fate. So it was exhilarating when, despite the stacked odds and the many ever-shifting perils, every last one of the Wild Boars was pulled out of the cave alive.

Talk about a Hollywood ending.

The day after the coach and the last of the boys were rescued, filmmaker Jon Chu, whose film Crazy Rich Asians would soon become a global hit, that put his industry on notice: “I refuse to let Hollywood the Thai Cave rescue story! No way. Not on our watch. That won’t happen or we’ll give them hell. There’s a beautiful story abt human beings saving other human beings. So anyone thinking abt the story better approach it right & respectfully.”

Four years later, those Hollywood offerings are finally streaming. , a National Geographic documentary by Free Solo directors Jimmy Chin and Chai Vasarhelyi, hit theaters in September 2021 and is now on Disney+. , a feature film directed by Ron Howard and starring Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell, dropped on Amazon Prime on August 5. And now , a limited series executive produced by Chu, is being released by Netflix on September 22. Finally, rumors are circulating that the streaming giant is also working on a documentary about the events.

While it remains to be seen if the public has an appetite for this much Thai cave content four years after the fact, I found it fascinating that so many top writers, filmmakers, and stars were attracted to the material. What was it about this story that captivated them, despite all the competition? And did any of them get it right?

William Nicholson, the two-time Oscar-nominated screenwriter, was following the rescue from a distance like everybody else in the summer of 2018, but when he was first approached to write Thirteen Lives he didn’t see drama in the happy ending. Then he dug into the details of what happened and realized how improbable the rescue was, and saw there was a very compelling movie to be made.

Thirteen Lives centers on two middle-aged English cave divers involved in the effort: retired firefighter Rick Stanton (Mortensen) and technology consultant John Volanthen (Farrell). They take over the underwater search and rescue operation from the Thai Navy SEALs, who lacked the relevant cave diving chops required to find the kids. That’s not a knock on the Thai navy—U.S. Navy SEALs don’t have that capability either.

“Here’s these divers,” Nicholson says. “They’re old, they’re amateurs, nobody pays them, they’re grumpy, and yet they are the only people who can do this particular job. And they go in, and they finally find the kids and make videos of them. And they come out and everybody cheers, and everybody’s happy. But these guys know the truth that all these kids are dead.” Navigating Tham Luang—with its many hazards, currents, and low visibility was difficult for even the accomplished cave divers, and they knew that diving those kids out of that cave would be exceedingly dangerous and perhaps impossible.

Stanton and Volanthen possess the dry humor and brazen lack of fashion sense found in most tech dive shops, and the dialogue is appropriately spare, too. It’s an intense yet understated film. Nothing is over-explained. You get the sense that Howard and Nicholson, and even Farrell and Mortensen—who deliver captivating but restrained performances—were content to stay out of the way.

“It kind of fell into a dramatic structure by itself,” Nicholson says. While the divers were busy trying to find the kids and devise a workable rescue plan, rain was still falling, and the water was rising. The only way to bring down the water levels was to flood and ruin the rice crop of local family farmers. “Then in the three days of the actual rescue, they’re racing the return of the rain. They get out most of the kids, and literally on the night before the end, down comes the rain. You couldn’t create a more ticking clock than that.”

In scope, Thirteen Lives closely mirrors National Geographic’s documentary The Rescue which also mostly focuses on the divers. Because P.J. van Sandwijk, an accomplished documentary producer turned Hollywood player, produced both films after successfully negotiating for the rights to Stanton’s and Volanthen’s stories.

In previous projects, Chin and Vasarhelyi have leaned on their most unique selling point: that Chin can physically get to places that are well beyond the abilities of other cinematographers, and then return with jaw-dropping material. The Rescue is more of a straight-ahead documentary. It blends archival footage, revealing interviews, and well-made underwater reenactments. Chin and Vasarhelyi sifted through hundreds of hours of news coverage to pin their story together.

However, in both Thirteen Lives and The Rescue, the kids and their coach, who was orphaned as a young boy and raised in a Buddhist monastery, are relegated to the background. This is despite the fact that they all maintained an incredible amount of faith and composure through the most harrowing of experiences—in part, by leaning on meditations and chants led by the coach. If that’s what Chu was worried about when he sent his Tweet—yet another movie succumbing to the tired white savior trope—it has a lot more to do with access than interest or awareness on the part of the filmmakers.

In the aftermath of the actual event, one of the trapped boy’s parents set up a trust to represent the Wild Boars and their families in future film rights negotiations. That mattered because most of these kids were 13 and 14 at the time, and in Thailand you remain a minor until you’re 20 years old. SK Global, the company that produced Crazy Rich Asians, secured those rights, tapped Chu to executive produce their series, and then . As a result, Chin, Vasarhelyi, Howard, and Nicholson were boxed out.

“It normally doesn’t work like that in nonfiction because it’s journalism,” says Chin. “But we navigated it as best we could.” In the end, he and Vasarhelyi zoomed in on the cave divers—taking pains to make sure that all the gear and techniques were dialed in to the last detail for their reenactments—and their risky plan to retrieve the Wild Boars. They are gifted adventure filmmakers, after all, and The Rescue is yet another banger.

There’s a maxim in journalism: the later you are, the smarter you have to be. I wouldn’t go so far as to call Netflix’s Thai Cave Rescue smarter than The Rescue or Thirteen Lives, but it does benefit from being able to feature the perspective of the 12 boys (Titan, Tee, Phong, Adul, Biw, Dom, Night, Nick, Mix, Note, Pim, Namhom) and their beloved Coach Ek. “John Chu wanted to be true to the story and start where the story started, which was with the boys,” says Dana Ledoux Miller, an American screenwriter who has worked in television writers rooms for ten years. Miller was called in by Michael Russell Gunn, a writer and producer on Billions, to write and create the series together. “It started with local officials who were doing their best under extraordinary circumstances and it grew from there. We really tried to capture the magic that is northern Thailand.”

I’ve reported from Northern Thailand several times. In fact, I reported on this very rescue, and in my opinion, Gunn and Miller’s series successfully bottled the magic. This was thanks in no small part to their all-Thai crew, including director Baz Poonpriya, and the deep level of research that went into creating the series. Gunn and Miller, neither of whom are Thai or Asian for that matter (Miller is part Samoan), interviewed the boys and their families extensively with the help of translators, and delved into the Thai government’s archives. They shot the series in Thailand, and some scenes were even filmed in the first two chambers of the real Tham Luang cave and the boys’ actual homes. They cast local people in lieu of professional actors to fill the roles of some of the boys and their parents. To decorate the shrine outside the cave for a pivotal scene, one of the mothers turned up with the same offerings they’d prepared when their boys were trapped inside.

In the first episode alone, five different ethnic dialects are used, and throughout the series the local Buddhist-Animist culture is featured prominently. Some episodes have the look and feel of a foreign film. However, aside from standout performances by Papangkorn Lerchaleampote (Coach Ek)—a rising star in Thailand who tragically died during the editing process—and renowned Thai actor Thaneth Warakulnukroh (Governor Narongsak), the acting is spotty.

The action is too. The team behind the Netflix series made a deal with Dr. Richard Harris, the cave diving anesthetist known as Doc Harry who is the only person alive with the combination of skills that could have made the rescue possible, and who put his medical license on the line to do it. But he doesn’t turn up until the second to last episode. Even then, Thirteen Lives—in which Harris is played by Joel Edgerton—serves that slice of the story better. The Rescue includes interviews with the man himself, which is even more compelling. That’s the trouble with focusing on so many scenes where the divers are not. Although time with Coach Ek and the boys is always well-spent in Thai Cave Rescue, there are a few too many logistics meetings where the threat of expository dialogue hovers like so many storm clouds. (A side note for Netflix: scuba and tech divers use air tanks, not oxygen tanks.)

And yet, in the final act of each of these three projects, when the rain is falling harder than ever, the dams and diversions are failing, and the last of the boys is carried out from the cave alive, it’s hard not to be moved. Because no matter which way you examine it from, or where the story is centered, the lessons of this improbable rescue come through.

“To be honest, I was worried that if this story was told from an eye of an outsider, the story will change in its essence,” says Poonpriya, who directed two episodes of the Netflix series including the pilot, and is known as one of Thailand’s best filmmakers. “However, I came to understand that the richness of the story has encouraged all the productions—whether it be the documentary, the series, or other treatments of the rescue—to be done with heart and attention to detail.”

In other words, here was an irresistible adventure tale that could have easily been sensationalized, or mishandled in a way that was offensive to the Thai people, and yet all three treatments produced compelling and thoughtful entertainment that actually complement one another. That couldn’t have happened without the sensitivity and skill of the filmmakers and the power of the rescue itself. “It stands for something,” Nicholson says. “Why did 10,000 people descend on those caves, saying, ‘I will do anything? What do you want me to do? Clean the latrine, cook, sweep, push water around? Whatever you want, I’ll come and do it.’ I truly believe that people’s deepest instinct is to cooperate, to work together to make things better for everybody. And it’s not a message we’re given enough.”

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In 2018, when Free Solo was busy breaking box office records and blowing minds, Jimmy Chin—who shot the film and directed it with his wife and collaborator Elizabeth “Chai” Vasarhelyi—was getting the same question a lot: How was Alex Honnold not paralyzed by fear as he clung to the face of El Capitan without a rope? Some wondered aloud if he wasn’t simply fearless.

Before becoming an Oscar-winning filmmaker, Chin enjoyed aÌędecades-long career as an alpinist, rock climber, backcountry skier, and photographer. He knew the answer to the question was that fear is ever-present for those who risk it all in the most dramatic and merciless of environments. However, that was difficult to explain in passing conversation given where most of us get our outdoor adventure content now. Those minute-long videos on social media deliver the adrenaline and triumph, but aren’t nearly long or nuanced enough to captureÌęthe will and craft that enables the best of the best to commune with their fear, and put it all on the line regardless.

Chin and Vasarhelyi’s new National Geographic series Edge of the Unknown with Jimmy Chin—their first foray into television, —is the piercing of that veil. “It’s a series that I’ve always wanted to make to give people a sense of what it means to be a truly elite athlete in this realm,” said Chin during an interview ahead of the show’s release. “The level of passion and commitment, the purpose and meaning the sports give to each of these individuals. Because ultimately, they’re all seeking this kind of transcendent experience, but there areÌętwo sides to that.”

Edge of the Unknown is all about that B-side. In each of the ten episodes (which were released all at once), Chin and Vasarhelyi train their lens on one or a small group of elite athletes, but dispense with their greatest triumphs in favor of their most spectacular failures and near-misses. Polar bears and crocodiles attack. Bones are broken. Minds are scrambled. Hearts stop beating.

Some athletes are more famous than others. Most people reading this will know snowboarder Travis Rice, big wave surfer Justine Dupont, big mountain skier Angel Collinson, , and legendary alpinist Conrad Anker. Honnold is there too. But so is the big-drop kayaker Gerd Serrasolses, and the young polar explorers Sarah and Eric McNair Landry.

If you’ve seen 2015’s Meru—a chronicle of Chin, Anker, and photographer Renan Ozturk’s first ascent up the Shark’s Fin on Mount Meru in the Indian Himalayas—you will recall that Chin once had a terrifying near miss himself, walking away from an avalanche that on film looked impossible to survive. Chin delves much deeper into that story for episode eight of the series, which is aptly named “Live Another Day.”

The interviews are intimate and often emotional. This is in part because when adventure athletes speak on camera to Jimmy Chin about their darkest moments, they trust him. “I feel like my understanding of what these athletes go through is a bit more acute than for someone who’s trying to tell the story from the outside,” says Chin. “I think they trusted us with these stories because they knew that we’d be sensitive and sensible about the telling.”

None of these stories are especially new. If you’ve been an șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű reader for as long as I have (or even half that long), watching this show is like paging through the back issues. There are moments when it feels as though Chin is repurposing material from his archives (didn’t we see Honnold climbing in Morocco in Free Solo?), however the intent here is not to simply satisfy core fans, but to entertain a more mainstream audience who won’t know or care. Plus, the stories are instant classics; human dramas that keep you riveted, and stimulate your own thirst for adventure. Not because the athletes appear fearless or invulnerable, but because you see them as survivors. They aren’t social media avatars. They are unvarnished human beings, unnerved, and inches from death. And yet, they emerge touched but not undone by what they’ve been through.

“They live with deep intention,” Chin says. “That’s the other thing I think that people don’t necessarily understand about these athletes. They live with the deepest intention because their lives are at stake in what they do. They have to decide every day and every moment to pursue it.”

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It was the first day of his job as a tour guide, but it didn’t take long for Francisco “Pancho” Lucero, 47, to show us something beautiful. Within two minutes, Lucero had steered his 23-foot boat over what I assumed was an amorphous shadow until the image fractured into 50 individual Mobula rays, moving in unison, 30 feet beneath the surface off Ensenada de Muertos.

The sea along the southeast coast of Mexico’s Baja peninsula last December was shimmering blue glass. The desert shore was dotted with a growing collection of second homes, built on the bones of dead pirates—hence the name, Bay of the Dead. This area is best accessed from a network of paved and dirt roads that unspool south from the port city of La Paz, past groves of saguaro cactus and through the fishing pueblo of Agua Amarga, where the Lucero family has lived for five generations.

The Lucero men once traveled by oar and sail and caught scalloped and smooth hammerheads in the bay. Shark meat was consumed by local families, and shark liver oil was used as medicine. Fins were exported to Hong Kong as early as the 1930s, but that wasn’t the primary economic driver for fishermen in southern Baja. Then, in the 1970s,Ìęoutboard motors arrived, around the same time that global demand for shark fins intensified. Now a variety of shark species are caught miles offshore, and while the meat still stays local—it’s sold for pennies—dried fins are exported to Hong Kong at a price of $500 per kilogram (roughly 2.2 pounds). A kilo typically includes fins from over 20 different sharks.

Lately, Lucero has had second thoughts about his line of work. It’s bloody, dangerous, and, due to dwindling shark numbers, pays less and less each year. He still catches sharks but envisions something different—something more—for his children. Which is how I wound up chartering his boat with marine biologist Frida Lara, 31, and photographer Porfiria Gomez, 34, the daughter of noted Mexican environmentalist Mario Gomez. For months they have visited pueblos and fishing camps up and down the state of Baja California Sur, trying to convince men like Lucero that sharks are worth more alive than dead.

Lara and the younger Gomez are based in La Paz, where Lara earned her master’s degree in marine biology, at the University of Baja California. In addition to her scientific work, Lara leads pelagic trips. She charters boats so her guests can glimpse and swim with big animals. Such unpredictable open-water safaris have long been a staple of marine biology fieldwork and in recent years have grown increasingly popular among ocean lovers around the world, especially free divers. La Paz is one of the best places to do it; thanks to a confluence of equatorial and arctic currents, the Gulf of California is an oasis of biodiversity, and on a given day it’s possible swim with sea lions, dolphins, rays, sharks, marlin, and even orcas.

Last summer was a good season for silky sharks. Each June they arrive from Revillagigedo National Park, the largest marine protected area (MPA) in Mexico, to give birth. It’s forbidden to fish for silky sharks throughout their two-month-long reproductive period, and Lara spent a magical afternoon among 30 of them at a seamount off Espíritu Santo Island in late July. The hunting season reopened on August 1.

“When we went back a few days later, there were no sharks,” she said. “Either they’d already started migrating south or they were dead.”

Despite dozens of national bans on imports and exports, finning is still decimating shark populations. The two biggest shark fin markets—Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China—sell out almost as quickly as supply comes in, and the animals are hunted relentlessly in seas across the globe.

Silky sharks are among the most sought-after for shark fin soup, and there are at least 80 fishing camps and pueblos along the coast of Baja. In Baja California Sur alone, there are 24,000 small-scale fishermen like Lucero who hunt sharks with simpleras—baited hooks on a line attached to anchored oil drums filled with foam. It’s been estimated that the world’s overall shark population has declined . And when you remove apex predators from the marine environment,Ìę of coral reefs that help make the ocean an effective carbon sink and climate stabilizer.

Lara, who spent two years researching shark migration patterns off Mexico’s Socorro Island, refuses to fault men like Lucero. After the fishing season recommenced in August, she and the younger Gomez spent time with Agua Amarga’s local fishermen, filmed them as they worked, and learned that they are being exploited to do the often hazardous work for millionaire exporters.

After viewing their footage, Mario Gomez, who in 2017 helped convince then Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto to create Revillagigedo National Park, asked local women to partner with him in a new effort to create the world’s largest MPA. Known as the Calcetine (“sock” in Spanish), it would encompass 2,200 kilometers (1,367 miles) of open water, spanning the entire southern half of the Baja peninsula, from Loreto on the Gulf coast to Magdalena Bay on the Pacific. It wouldn’t be a no-take zone or impact fishermen like Lucero who work in small boats that lack storage capacity, but it would end industrial fishing in all of Baja California Sur.

As we motored up the coast, we spotted a pair of humpback whales and stopped for a long dive session along a stunning reef, and on our way back, Lucero shared the beats of his typical workday. Each morning at six, he motors 30 miles out to sea to check his simpleras for scalloped hammerhead, blue, and silky sharks, but occasionally he finds a 600-pound, 15-foot mako dangling from a hook. Recently, a friend of his attempted to pull a heavy shark into his boat by the gills, lost his grip, and sliced his forearm on the dead shark’s razor-sharp teeth. He almost bled out on the long, frantic ride to shore.

Lucero arrives home at around 3 P.M. for lunch but returns to the sea by sunset to fish for tuna and jackfish, which become shark bait. His workday doesn’t end until 10 P.M. Days off are dictated by the wind, because single-engine pangas are powerless to fight the strong gusts that kick up from the hot desert. Three years ago, a neighbor’s engine failed. The wind pushed the men in it out to sea, and they were presumed dead until an oceanographic expedition found them, adrift, nine days later. Lucero’s reward for all the hard work and risk? Roughly $150 per week.

Nevertheless, when Lara first approached Lucero and his neighbors with alternatives to shark fishing, alarm bells sounded. “I was very doubtful,” he said. “We were all very doubtful.” But 2021 had been abysmal on the water. Shark numbers were meager for the second year in a row, and the sizes of the catch were smaller than usual, so he listened as Lara relayed a story about the dive resort of Cabo Pulmo, farther south. It was a fishing village until 1995, when the waters all around it were declared a national park. Today it’s a known for giant schools of fish and bull sharks. The original fishing families of Pulmo are now affluent enough to educate their children overseas.

Even more relatable was the development of nearby La Ventana, which has become a magnet for divers and snorkelers hoping to glimpse the annual aggregations of Mobula rays, which descend on the coast south of La Paz by the thousands each spring. La Ventana boat captains make more than Lucero’s weekly pay in a day, often grossing $700 before gas and boat expenses. Some locals have opened restaurants. Others have built small inns.

While at sea, Lucero has watched rays perform aerials from his fishing boat, with nobody else around. He’s motored among whales, dolphins, orcas, and sharks often enough to learn their habits and hideaways, and he knew Lara was right when she suggested that, in this part of the Gulf, the spectacular sights were possible any time of year. All he and the other local fishermen had to do was be open to sharing it.

Lara and Porfiria Gomez have cofounded a nonprofit called Ìęwith their friends. ItsÌęmission is to help shark fishermen make the transition into tourism. They facilitate funding for new boats built for tourism, book guests, and help captains adjust to the new gig through mentorship and training. “Fishermen know the water better than anybody else,” Lara said. “They just need to learn the safest and most effective way to approach wildlife and get comfortable with tourists.”

When Mario Gomez mentioned the possibility of an industrial fishing ban in Baja California Sur, Lucero was convinced. Tuna boats from Ensenada or mainland Mexico sail to southern Baja to deploy drift nets that sink down to 50 feet and can extend for miles. “They get more tuna in one take than we get in months of fishing for bait,” Lucero said. The bycatch can be horrifying, too. Lara documented one drift-net incident in which 100 silky sharks were killed.

The commercial and industrial fishing sectors have succeeded in convincing sport andÌęfishermen worldwide that MPAs are a threat, when they’ve actually been , fish size, and biodiversity. Intact ecosystems are also more climate resilient, which is why dozens of countries have pledged to protect 30 percent of their land and sea from development or industrial exploitation. The Calcetine could meet Mexico’s marine-preservation obligation with a stroke of current Mexican president AndrĂ©s Manuel LĂłpez Obrador’s pen.

Whether or not the Calcetine dream materializes, the budding partnership between Agua Amarga fishermen and Orgcas bears watching. Tourism accounts for two-thirds of southern Baja’s GDP. Half of that—the fastest-growing sector—revolves around marine biodiversity. Think: whale-watching, diving, and sportfishing. Could adventure tourism help the Lucero family flourish? Will other shark fishermen follow suit? If so, how long might it take local shark numbers to rebound?

We didn’t manage to swim with orcas or sharks that morning, but that’s how pelagic trips go sometimes, and anyway, it was winter back home, while here the water was blue and warm, the sun shining, and the scenery spectacular. After our tour, Lucero invited us for lunch in his garden. He served fresh triggerfish ceviche and mahi-mahi sashimi, prepared by his 24-year-old son’s close friend who works as a chef at La Ventana.

“After they came to talk with us, I got hooked by the idea,” Lucero said of his conversations with Lara and Porfiria Gomez. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it.” He glanced at his son, Fran, a bright, aspiring entrepreneur who has watched La Ventana’s rise with keen eyes and has big dreams for his own hometown. “I want to go into tourism, because that is the future.”

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On September 8, rock climber Tommy Caldwell posted an imageÌę: he’s barefoot and leaping in a conifer grove, holding an American flag.

“I grew up pledging allegiance to the flag and believing America was nearly perfect,” he wroteÌęin the caption.Ìę“As I became more aware of the ugliness in our past and present, the meaning of the American flag changed in my mind from national pride to symbolizing a lie that we try and tell ourselves and our children. When I recently moved into a house that sported a big flag out front, the first thing I did was take it down.”

If you’ve been following Caldwell during this year of discontent, his feelings about the flag are less surprising than seeing him rock it proudly. Most of the time he’s agitating for action to solve the climate crisis, a causeÌęforÌęwhich he’s testified in Congress. Over the past several months he’s spoken out against George Floyd’s murder and in support of Black Lives Matter. He’s used his social media as an outlet to educate his followers and urge them to vote. And he’s not alone.

Throughout 2020, adventure athletes—along with professional athletes in the , ,Ìę, and beyond—have used their platforms to discuss racism, social justice, and environmental issues. Caldwell’s post stood out, because few influencers-turned-activists, if any, had invoked patriotism in the name of what are typically considered progressive causes.

Ever since the Vietnam War, when anti-war protesters burned flags along with their draft cards in the late 1960s, America’s left wing has largely ceded stars and stripes pageantry to conservatives.Ìę“The flag was abandoned by those who were really upset with our foreign adventures, and really unhappy with the way our legal system has often been unkind and unfair to marginalized people,” says Tom Zoellner, journalist and author of , a poignant collection of essays about American identity. Some comments on Caldwell’s post reflected as much: “That flag represents nothing but murder, rape and theft,” wrote one follower. Others were more sympathetic:Ìę“I’m with ya Tommy. Time to reappropriate our flag.”

In 2019, snowboarder Jeremy Jones, founder of the non-profit , began researching the intersection of adventure sports and environmental politics and found an opportunity. Through POW’s market research, Jones learned that 50 million Americans spend the bulk of their recreation time outdoors—self-identified hikers, climbers, surfers, bikers, skiers, trail runners, and more. And regardless of political affiliation, the vast majority of those people believe that human-caused climate change is real, and that our government needs to address it. 50 million people is over 15 percent of the country, enough to swing an election.Ìę

At the winter Outdoor Retailer show last January, Jones and POW unveiled a campaign to tap into that voting block. They dubbed it the , and used the campaign to positionÌęenvironmental protection as the ultimate expression of patriotism, and . POW created an online community and series of resources to help mobilize outdoorspeople to vote, and to do so with climate in mind. And they asked their amabassadors—outdoor athletes and influencers including Caldwell—to getÌępatriotic on social media, in a nod to unity and an attempt to reframe environmentalism as an American ideal.Ìę

“The places that we love so much—that so many of us identify with—are at stake and are, quite frankly, on the ballot,” says Jones. “It bothered me that the flag had become this divisive symbol. It would be awesome to take that back.”

But was that possible in a year on fire?

During this summer’sÌęprotestsÌęto demand change and accountability for law enforcement, you seldom saw an American flag among those who marched. But at Black Lives Matter counter-protests, Trump rallies, and other , stars and stripes abounded. Which explains why some liberals might be reluctant to wave the flag.Ìę

Ultrarunner Clare Gallagher, a POW ambassador, is , but declined to participate in the Outdoor State campaign. While she agrees with the gist of the campaign, she wants to keep her platform laser-focused on . “I’m deferring to the civil rights movement that’s happening,” Gallagher says, “and I don’t see the leaders that I’m trying to follow and learn from in that movement embracing our flag. I want to be talking about climate and racial justice right now. Not about patriotism.”

But Zoellner believes that POW is on to something powerful. “The fact is that almost all of us, particularly those who love the outdoors, are deeply patriotic,” he says. Although the Trump administrationÌęhas rolled back environmental protections to exploit public lands and build the border wall, in American politics Republicans were the original environmentalists. Preserving land from development and creating more access to wild spaces are early 20th century Republican notions, ZoellnerÌęexplains.ÌęDemocrats may be considered the more environmentally concerned party today—unlike Republicans, they have aÌęÌęand explicitly acknowledge the necessity of protecting natural resources in their platform—but POW’s research shows that the environment and climate change can also be bridge issues to unite a powerful, cross-party environmental coalition.

In order to be effective, that coalition will need to elect politicians willing to solve systemic and foundational issues, like reckless resource extraction,Ìęexplains Lakota skier Connor Ryan, a contributor to POW’s campaign.ÌęThe 27-year-old, whose family has been through military drafts and abusive for Native children, is well aware of the many ways in which the American experiment has failed the people who live here. Yet he still considers himself a “patriot to the land,” in part because of skiing. When you’re making a perfect powder turn, Ryan says, you experience a fleeting bit of connection with the natural world. Ideally, that connection translates into a desire to protect and preserve.Ìę

“If you experience that unity with nature, that flow state through your sport, and then don’t go out and protect the land? I mean, that’s blasphemy,” Ryan says. “It’s the original sin of capitalism, the original sin of colonization, seeing yourself as separate from the land and separate from nature. It is not only a spiritual error. It’s a scientific error. In Lakota, we say, Mitákuye Oyás’iƋ, everything is related. We have to remember we are nature also. In protecting nature, we’re protecting ourselves.”

Caldwell, who has been climbing since age three, knows that feeling of flow and connectivity well. But for most of his life, he admits he paid scant attention to politics. Then he had kids, and began researching the climate crisis for the first time. The more concerned he became for their future, the more he engaged in the political process. He learned that lawmakers are surprisingly accessible and want to hear from their constituents, and came to believe in the power of his vote.Ìę

He also realized that addressingÌęclimate change was going to take more than half of the country. “We’ve got to work together to fix it,” he says. So he ultimately re-embraced the flag, to share his love of the land—and of his country—with people on both sides of the political spectrum. He even put the flag back up at his house.

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On January 20, 2017, President Donald Trump’s inauguration day, Laiken Jordahl went for a hike in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, an ecological jewel in the Sonoran Desert that straddles the U.S.-Mexico border. The monument is studded with towering saguaro cacti and a rare namesake plant that looks like it was pulled from the Dr. Seuss universe.

Jordahl, 24 at the time, worked for the National Park Service developing wilderness stewardship plans. Trump won the 2016 election in part by promising to extend an impenetrable border wallÌęfrom California to Texas. As Jordahl hiked through the desert, he wondered if it was legalÌęto build something like that on protected federal land.Ìę

“Everyone assured me it could never happen,” JordahlÌęsaid at a rally he organized on November 9, 2019. “This place is just too special. And here we are, two and a half years later, standing in front of the first new sections of Trump’s wall.”Ìę

Last May, the Department of Defense awarded the first in what would become $1.3 billion in contracts to Southwest Valley ConstructorsÌęfor what it called a “Tucson Sector barrier wall replacement project.” That money was part of the $6 billion sourced from the Pentagon to build the wall without congressional approval after Trump declared a national emergency on the southern border on February 15. His wall was coming to Arizona. Sixty-three miles were to be built in the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol’s (USBP) Tucson Sector, which includes Organ Pipe.

When construction began in early October, Jordahl, who now worksÌęas the borderlands campaignerÌęfor the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Arizona, documented it on his . Although the Department of Homeland Security claims it transplanted all healthy cacti in the way of the project, Jordahl posted videos of green 150-year-old saguaroÌęlying on the groundÌęthat he said had been bulldozed. The videosÌęwent viral, especially in Tucson, a hive of border activism. The rally was Jordahl’sÌęfirst opportunity to bring others to Organ Pipe so they could see America’s new wall, and its destruction, for themselves.

That’s why I flew in. Like many people, I’d been watching Trump’s border wall push from afar. Whenever I read or watched reports about it or his administration’s wider immigration policies, like family separation and new hurdles for asylum seekers, IÌęconsideredÌęthe human costs. To me, the wall seemed to be about more than border security. It was a monument denouncing America’s increasing cultural diversity. Then again, I’d never been there. Once I watched Jordahl’s videos, I knew it was time to see the Arizona borderlands for myself. I planned a two-week trip to try to determine what, if anything, was at stake.

More thanÌę300 people showed up atÌęJordahl’s demonstration, and they spanned the Tucson gamut. There were arty Burning Man types dressed like desert wildlife, a knot of retired activists who call themselves the Raging Grannies, and indigenous people from the Tohono O’odham Nation. All of us walked past heavy construction equipment and hundreds of pallets stacked with 30-foot-long bollards—hollow pillars that, when standing, form the bulk of the wall. We stepped over a dozen dying saguaros, their shallow roots exposed and left to decompose in the gravelly pink soil along the edge of a dirt border road expanded to facilitate construction.Ìę

“It hurts me,” said Philip Morales, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation as he contemplated a felled saguaro. “We call them our grandmother and grandfather, because they have a spirit in them. And it gives to us. It gives us saguaro fruit, gives us sustenance.” He approached the wall, sang a blessing, and prayed. Others joined him, but soon the collective sadness turned to outrage. A chant began. “Tear down this wall! Tear down this wall!”Ìę

In the minds of the activists, it wasn’t just cactus and local indigenous customs that had been trampled. It was the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and 38 other federal laws that were waived to green-light a project whose merits are debatable at best. All because of an obscure provision of a bill that passed through Congress as a budget rider more than a decade earlier.

Typically, the presence of a single endangered species is enough to at least delay major construction projects, but in 2005, Congress gave President George W. Bush the ability to waive federal laws to build a section of border wall in California’s Smuggler’s Gulch, near San Diego. Except the president’s expanded authority was not confined by geography or time. It was open-endedÌęand buried in the Real ID Act, which assigned a national standard to state identification cards. Debate about that bill and these new presidential powers were limited in the House and Senate because the Real ID Act was passed as a budget rider on an appropriations bill funding the wars in Iraq and AfghanistanÌęand much-needed relief for victims of the Boxing Day tsunami in Southeast Asia. Nobody likes voting against the troops or victims of natural disasters. It passed the Senate, 100 votes to zero.

Bush used his waiver authority to finish that wall in Smuggler’s Gulch and erect similar walls and smaller barriers along the border afterÌęCongress directed him to do so via the 2006 Secure Fence Act. President Obama held the same waiver authorityÌęand never used it. President Trump has seized on it to act unilaterallyÌęand build the wall wherever he likes.Ìę

According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to date, 132 miles of newÌęborder wall have been slated for construction in Arizona since Trump was elected, at a cost of roughly $14 million per mile. The 63 miles in the Border Patrol’sÌęTucson Sector are already under construction. Environmentalists like Jordahl fear the wall will affect 23 endangered and at-risk species, including the Sonoran pronghorn antelope, Mexican wolves, and the elusive jaguar.Ìę

“This is exactly how you cause extinction,” Jordahl says. “You fragment habitat and populations into smaller and smaller sizes, their genetic diversity decreases, they become more vulnerable to disease and inbreeding, and they wink out.”

That matters because if you expand the term “borderlands,”Ìęas most ecologists do, to include 120 miles on either side of the line, you get a place where bald eagles roost near macaws, bobcat and ocelot might cross paths, and mountain lions, jaguars, and wolves compete for white-tailed deer. It’s an overlay of subtropical and temperate habitats, a wonderland of regal saguaro cactus—where woodpeckers, screech owls, and Harris hawks nest—and rugged mesquite trees, whose seedpods are eaten by coyote and javelinaÌęand were once used by the Tohono O’odham to make flour. Its jagged mountains rise like sky islands from a sea of undulating grasslands irrigated by seasonal washes that flood during summer monsoonsÌęand oases like Organ Pipe’s Quitobaquito Springs. The wall under construction at Organ Pipe is slated to extend past Quitobaquito, an important wildlife watering hole.Ìę

“It’s a sacred site and has been for generations,” says David Garcia, a Tohono O’odham elder. Every year, young peopleÌęfrom the tribeÌęgather at Quitobaquito to run some 150 miles to Mexico’s Gulf of California and back in a salt-collection ritual that doubles as one of the most intense endurance events in North America. WhenÌęthe new wall is complete, that generations-old salt-run course will have to be altered.Ìę

The Tohono O’odham Nation spans the U.S.-Mexico border, with most of its land on the U.S. side, just east of Organ Pipe. The national monument once belonged to them. When Garcia grew up on the reservation, there wasn’t a palpable Border Patrol presence, so it was easy to cross back and forth to Sonora, where his father was born. “There were nine gates that you could drive through. Now there’s only one that you can walk through,” Garcia says, “and there’s a USBP base on the reservation. So, at any given time, an agent can say yay or nay to allow you to go into Mexico or come back onto the reservation into the United States.”Ìę

“The U.S.-Mexico border touches six national parks [Ed.: three are national historic parks],” says Erica Prather, a national outreach representative with Defenders of Wildlife in Tucson. She was at the protest, collecting signatures to pressure Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) to oppose the wall project. “Organ Pipe is obviously a national park unit. This isn’t just guesswork;Ìęthere’s science that’s been done. This is a wildlife migration corridor. If this were the northern border in Glacier National Park, people would be having a shit fit.”Ìę

That may be true, but one look at the existing vehicle barriers on the border in Organ Pipe, and you can see why some consider them insufficient. They look like corral fencing made out of steel—six to ten feet tall, easy for both wildlife and people to slip through or hop over. Of course, those barriers aren’t the main obstacle migrants face. The desert itself is a natural border wall. Harsh and unforgiving, thick with spiny plants and blessed with precious little water, temperatures can rise to 120 degrees in summer and plummet below freezing in winter. Desert wildlife is built to survive all that. Humans, not so much. Ever since the Clinton administration ramped up urban border enforcement, would-be migrants have attempted to navigate the southern Arizona wilderness, often with tragic results. Since the mid-1990s, the remains of more than 3,000 migrants have been found in the bush. For every body found, immigrant rights groups say there are five to ten that may never be located.Ìę

Quitobaquito is not the only wildlife water source affected by the Tucson Sector’s new border wall. On November 14, Jordahl drove us southeast from Tucson toward the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge (SBNWR), which is miles from any paved roads. While Organ Pipe is considered a high-traffic zone for migrants, thanks to its immediate proximity to Mexico’s Highway 2, only three migrants have been detected crossing into SBNWR in the past three years, perhaps because this area is wild on both sides of the border. Nevertheless, 20 miles of wall are being built here, cutting off a critical riparian habitat known as Black Draw, a swampy spring-fed creek that forms the headwaters of Mexico’s Yaqui RiverÌęand attracts wildlife from both sides of the border. The wall will also extend directly in front of the 150-acre Slaughter Ranch, which has a lakelike reservoir fed by artesian wells.Ìę

Fred Dunn manages Slaughter Ranch and says he’s seen Mexican wolves, mountain lions, and bobcats more than once. He’s even heard rumors of a jaguar passing back and forth over the border. (SBNWR officials have no record of wolf or jaguar sightings within the refuge’s boundaries.)ÌęDunn loves animals and is concerned about how much water the construction crews are using to mix concrete for so many miles of border fencing.Ìę

Builders have drilled multiple wells, he says. Some of that water is sprayed on the road as dust control. Most is used to mix concrete. Dunn is anxious that his artesian wells and reservoir could run dry, so he recently paid $40,000 to build a new deep well of his own. Similar water issues exist in Organ Pipe, Jordahl says. He worries that Quitobaquito Springs might dry up if construction crews drain the local aquifer. Are his and Dunn’s fears legitimate? That’s impossible to answer, as no environmental impact studies or reports have been required at either site because of Trump’s waiver authority.Ìę

After visiting Dunn, Jordahl and I hiked Black Draw, where we spooked wild turkeys rummaging in the shade, and continued on foot for 3.5 miles to the newest section of the wall. Although the Tucson Sector contract was awarded to Southwest Valley Constructors, that name is an empty shell. It’s a subsidiary of an Omaha-based firm called Kiewit, which has offices across North America and is a favored contractor of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. A source close to the project told me that Kiewit is in violation of its contract on environmental grounds. It did look like Black Draw had been filled in with construction debris near the road, but Kiewit officials never responded to multiple interview requests, and SBNWR officials wouldn’t discuss it. Based on my short exchanges with some of the crew we saw working there, the wall project was just two weeks old, and they had completed about 200 yards so far. Most of the labor force we met were Latino.Ìę

It was a strange thing to witness—a new swatch of wall in the middle of nowhere, connected to nothing, glinting in the setting sun. It looked like an oversized abstract art installation, which was fitting, because when you’re standing in borderlands wilderness, mountain ranges painted against the eastern and western sky, the border itself looks like an abstraction:Ìęan arbitrary line bisecting the landscape.Ìę

During my two weeks in southern Arizona, I visited six sections of the border. In addition to the new wall, there was an 18-foot variety, built in the Bush era;Ìęvehicle barriers like at Organ Pipe;Ìęand four-strand barbed-wire fencing at the southern end of the Arizona Trail in the Huachuca Mountains, a known jaguar and wolf runway. I quizzed U.S. and Mexican soldiers about the wildlife they saw as they conducted surveillance or patrolled for cartel-affiliated smugglers who run migrants and drugs across the border. I met veteran Border Patrol agents at their local bar. They flashed images on their iPhones of marijuana bundles worth more thanÌę$100,000 and the smugglers they’d arrested. I met recent deportees and Mexican, Honduran, and Venezuelan asylum seekers in Nogales, Mexico. I glimpsed surveillance towers, Border Patrol choppers, and wildlife. Lots of wildlife, including coyotes, jackrabbits, white-tailed deer, and too many birds and bats to count. Much of it within spitting distance of the border.

When I asked a Border PatrolÌępress representative why the agency chose to begin construction at Organ Pipe and SBNWR, they mentioned “availability of real estate.” The land was already in federal hands. However, Defenders of Wildlife and the Center for Biological Diversity believe that means it belongs to the people, not the president, and should be managed in the public’s interest. Prather considers border wall construction in Organ Pipe and SBNWR to be public lands theft on par with the reduction of Bears Ears National Monument and the pending sale of oil leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.Ìę

In an emailed statement, theÌęBorder Patrol wrote, “Deploying wall system in high-priority areas—particularly urban areas where illegal border crossers can quickly vanish into the surrounding community—allows USBP to decide where border crossings take place, not smugglers, and USBP can deploy personnel and technology in complement to border barrier.”

Set aside the fact that the newest wall is nowhere near urban areas, and the agency’s statement remains troubling. It alludes to a funneling of human patrol and air resources, as well as migrants and smugglers, away from paved roads and flatlands andÌętoward the mountains, which are crucial wildlife corridors for predators and prey. And for what?Ìę

We know from that the only drugs flowing through the porous border areas in Arizona’s wilderness, from Mexico into the United States, is marijuana, not opioids or cocaine. Hard drugs come through urbanized border checkpoints, because they are odorless. Even human migration has slowed way down. There are still illegal border crossings, but these days, according to migrant advocates and Border Patrol agents I met, most would-be migrants prefer to apply for asylum and hope for the best rather than risk their lives and attempt to evade Border Patrol.Ìę

Defenders of Wildlife and the Center for Biological Diversity litigate to enforce environmental laws. The Center for Biological Diversity has challenged Trump’s waiver authority in court and lost twice. A pending longshot appeal to the Supreme Court is the organization’s last resort. It has also challenged Trump’s emergency declaration that allowed him to fund the wall without congressional approval. The White House has asked a judge to dismiss the case. Arguments will be heard in a Washington, D.C., federal court on Monday. Both organizations also document wildlife (Center for Biological Diversity’s Russ McSpadden has in Southern Arizona) and advocate on its behalf. Defenders also works on rewilding projects.Ìę

Craig Miller, senior Southwest representative at Defenders of Wildlife, has been involved with jaguar conservation and Mexican wolf reintroduction in Arizona since the 1990s, when there were just seven Mexican wolves left. Thanks in part to his work with local ranchers, today there are more than 130 wolves roaming Arizona and New MexicoÌęand about 30 more across the border in Mexico.Ìę

“The wall, if completed and if it remains, will prevent us from ever achieving one of the most robust and important rewilding initiatives on the continent,” Miller says.Ìę“Not just for Mexican wolves, but for all that represents. We’ve made good progress over the decadesÌęat preserving the northernmost population of jaguars, which historically roamed throughout Arizona and New Mexico up to the Grand Canyon. Now we have a stronghold of wolves and abundant suitable habitat throughout the region, but if they can’t get to Mexico from here, it’s just a pipe dream. It would prevent the essential flow of genetics.”

Diversity, in other words, is crucial, not just for endangered species, but for any healthy system. “Diverse systems are more interesting. They also happen to be more resilient, fertile, and productive,” Miller says. “In this region, life flows north to south, through all of these sky-island mountain ranges and seas of grasslands. This border wall amputates it. It’s a tourniquet. It prevents life flow across the landscape.”

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When his phone rang, Ben Reymenants, 45, was packing his dive gear. Reymenants is one of the most sought-after tech diving instructors in Southeast Asia. He’s in the water 300 days a year and has written multiple manuals on tech diving, which utilizes specialized training, equipment, and gas mixtures to enable divers to go much deeper and stay down longer than recreational scuba divers. The Belgian national once set an open-water depth record. When record-breaking tech divers crave further instruction, they find Reymenants.

He’d spent much of his season working six or seven days at a time in and around the deep sea caves of southern Thailand for his business, . So Reymenants and his Dutch wife and business partner, Simone, decided to spend a week diving in the shallow reefs of the Philippines before returning home to Phuket, Thailand. That all changed when he answered the phone.

It was a cave diving buddy, Ruengrit Changkwanyuen, a regional manager for General Motors Thailand and a consultant with the Thai Navy SEALs. Changkwanyuen had been one of the first volunteers to show up at the mouth of the Tham Luang cave system, in the mountains along the Myanmar border, two days after a junior soccer team hiked inside with their 25-year-old assistant coach .

Like everyone in Thailand, Reymenants had been following the story. In Thai Buddhist culture, caves are sacred. Many are sprinkled with stupas and golden Buddha statues, which pilgrims visit to light candles, make offerings, meditate, and pray. For much of the year, the 6.4-mile underground network of chambers, tunnels, collapses, and dead ends that form the Tham Luang caves are navigable by foot, and it’s common to hike inside. The soccer team had visited the caves near the town of Chiang Rai many times before, and on June 23, they trekked more than a mile underground through three glittering chambers connected by long narrow corridors, called siphons. During the wet season from June to September, however, the Tham Luang Forest Park becomes saturated. Heavy rains leak into the cave from all sides and swallow up every inch of airspace. At some point while the team was hiking, the cave was inundated with a flash flood, forcing the boys and their coach to higher ground and cutting off their escape.

When the news broke on June 24, Reymenants contemplated catching a plane to Chiang Rai, but then the Thai Navy SEALs showed up en masse, followed by a team of . The boys, it seemed, were in capable hands.

Changkwanyuen told him that circumstances had changed. He said that in the initial 24 hours, the SEALs made good progress. They worked their way through three main chambers. Each was wide enough to include dry ground jutting with stalagmites. The vaulted ceilings provided plenty of airspace. As they ventured deeper, the SEALs strung guidance, radio, and power lines so they could have a base of operations as close as possible to wherever the soccer team was located. They also sketched maps to determine where they had been and where they might still need to search.

When the divers reached the third and final chamber, they made a discovery: a pile of cleats and backpacks. They could see footprints leading toward a siphon hemorrhaging floodwater. If the kids were alive, they had to be somewhere beyond that corridor. That third chamber became divers’ base camp.

A platoon of SEALs geared up to penetrate the 650-foot-long siphon. Visibility was a few inches, and at the very end, they reached a vortex—a whirlpool fed by a confluence of currents from opposite directions. Nobody realized it yet, but they’d reached a pivotal T-junction and were just a quarterÌęto half a mile from finding the kids. As they searched for a tunnel to take them deeper inside, the force of the water shoved them right, where they found an opening and entered another corridor until they reached a cramped bottleneck and turned back. That’s when the weather turned against them. A second deluge flooded out all their progress and cost the divers an additional half-mile of navigable airspace. That underwater T-junction—and the tunnel leading toward the kids—was farther away, and there was no guarantee the divers would be able to find it again. Changkwanyuen wanted Reymenants to help them find their way back.

Reymenants hopped a plane from Phuket to Chiang Rai at 6 a.m. on June 26. When he landed, police drove him to the mouth of the Tham Luang cave. A village of hundreds of media and volunteers had sprouted at the entrance. There would soon be thousands. A team of Thai civil engineers was working to pump water and build containment dams, and local women prepared meals around the clock. Throngs came to keep vigil. Reymenants was led directly to the mouth of the cave. He’d never been there before, and the first thing he noticed was how beautiful it was. Then he came upon a team of SEALs on their way out after a fruitless underwater mission—and realized they weren’t even equipped for extreme cave diving.

He wasn’t shocked. Like in the United States, Thai Navy SEALs are mission-specific. The majority of their underwater work unfolds in the first 20 feet of depth, where they can breathe pure oxygen so they don’t exhale any bubbles in the water and can move unseen to plant depth charges or emerge on beaches in the dead of night. Among both American and Thai SEALs are a handful of divers who can plunge more than 600 feet by breathing mixed gases to perform extreme submarine recovery missions, but that skill set is not common.

There are two main categories of cave dives. Deep dives are what Ben Reymenants is known for. He regularly penetrates limestone caves in the Andaman Sea, where depths exceed 500 feet and where visibility can exceed 200 feet (with the proper lights). He’s been deeper than 700 feet below the surface, has come eyeball to nose with a new species of methane-eating worm, and has received manicures from a team of transparent shrimp on long ascents. But this wouldn’t be one of those dives. This was a long, or horizontal, dive. But since deep-water caves are often accessed via narrow siphons, Reymenants was both uniquely equipped and experienced to contribute.

An eighth-mile from the cave entrance, Reymenants arrived at the first chamber, strapped on his Triton 3 rebreather, slipped on his drysuit, and waded into hip-deep rapids. Immediately, he was swept off his feet and turned on his back like a helpless turtle. Nearby, Navy SEALs glared at him. Reymenants had been touted as a potential savior to what increasingly felt like a doomed mission, and he wasn’t inspiring much confidence. He shook his head, righted himself, grabbed the rope, and began pulling himself upstream against the flow.

“It was like fighting a hurricane while dragging your dive gear behind you,” Reymenants said via Skype. “Think of the worst CrossFit workout of your life.” Then add dirty water.

He navigated one siphon and came to the dry ground of the second chamber. Reymenants stripped off his gear and hiked up and over a rise 60 feet high before sliding down the other side. Then he suited back up and sank into the rapids again to charge through another long siphon. The third chamber included a dry hill that had become diver base camp. It looked like something out of the Himalayas. Oxygen and air cylinders were strewn about, along with water bottles and protein bar wrappers. The Navy SEALs were everywhere, radios chirping. Reymenants stepped to the edge of a flow that disappeared into the darkness. The water spun and frothed the color of a caffĂš latte. It had taken three hours for Reymenants just to reach the departure point of his first dive.

Reymenants planned to dive on oxygen and chose his drysuit so he could stay in the 69-degree water for up to four hours. He also brought multiple lamps—dive lights burn out quickly, and he couldn’t chance being left in the dark. Before Reymenants submerged, he’d received a briefing and studied available maps. The SEALs were working off satellite maps and their own sketches, but Reymenants and the English team were partial to the maps drawn by dry cavers. A French team was the first to map the Tham Luang cave 30 years ago. In 2015, those maps were updated by two English-born geologists. Reymenants had spoken to one of them before his initial dive, and everyone agreed they needed to find that T-junction again. If they could find it, everyone was confident they would find the kids.

“That first dive was a total disaster,” Reymenants said. His drysuit ripped, he smashed one of his dive computers against a rock as he fought his way forward, and the maps he’d read were drawn by people walking along the floor, not swimming near the roof. Even in areas where there was a foot or two of airspace, it was nearly impossible to find any familiar structure to work from. Underwater visibility was nonexistent. Reymenants covered a distance of 500 feet and laid line with his typical cave reel; it was the only line he had at his fingertips when he left Phuket, but it was just one millimeter thick. Such a thin line is useful in deep water or when currents are stable, but he knew the line could snap at any moment in what amounted to Class III water. If it did, Reymenants or whoever was upstream of the break would be in deep shit.

He climbed out of the water back at camp three roughly four hours after his dive began and consulted with the English dive team. Led by Rick Stanton and John Volanthen, the group when they found a crew of six British soldiers who had been trapped in a flooded cave in Mexico for six days. That was the first of several high-profile rescue and recovery missions; they are widely regarded as among the best cave divers on earth. Reymenants, Stanton, and Volanthen all agreed that they were hip-deep in a suicide mission. Nobody was sure if the kids and their coach were still alive, but they were certain more lives would be lost if they kept searching under the current conditions. Reymenants had been living in Thailand for 18 years, so he approached Navy SEAL command to break the news. But the commander wouldn’t call off the search.

“They couldn’t and wouldn’t just let the boys die. They made it clear that they would keep searching with or without our help,” Reymenants said.

Reymenants glanced over at a group of SEALs resting against the cave wall; some of them were as young as 19. He asked his liaison to find thicker rope.

The next day, Reymenants was back in the water. This time, he wore a more durable wetsuit instead of a drysuit and was joined by fellow cave explorer Maksym Polejaka, who had flown in to help. They carried 650 feet of thick rock-climbing rope, sourced by the SEALs and stuffed into a bag—the whole thing weighed 40 pounds. Reymenants was still on his rebreather. Polejaka was diving on air and dragged five tanks along with him. By then, the engineers had made progress with a plan to dam the inflow and pump water out of the caves. Water levels had receded and visibility improved to a few feet as a result, and the divers could surface every 300 feet to communicate. They were still swimming near the ceiling, however.

“It was like being a bird in a house,” Reymenants said. “We had to rediscover every meter of that cave. There was a lot of trial and error. We were feeling our way through.” Yet by the time they made their way back to base camp in the third chamber, they had laid all 650 feet of line and taken compass bearings, which the SEALs used to verify that, at long last, they were on their way back toward the T-junction.

The English divers dropped in next and were able to link Reymenants’ and Polejaka’s line with the original line that the Navy SEALs tied off on day one—another big breakthrough. When they dropped in again, Reymenants and Polejaka each carried two bags of rope. They followed the original SEAL line to its end, and then pushed farther. “Your head becomes your greatest enemy,” Reymenants said. “You start to think, ‘Am I going the right way? Will I ever find my way back? Will the restrictions get worse?’”

They made strong progress until they reached that vortex and their visibility receded from feet to inches. They were shoved right. Reymenants dove down, found an opening, and continued through a corridor that became increasingly narrow and muddy until he could no longer move forward or back. He was stuck. Adrenaline surged through his body. His heart pounded. Reymenants tried to relax, because when breathing gas, elevated heart and respiratory rates deplete air supply.

“[Polejaka] could tell something was horribly wrong when he heard strange noises coming from my rebreather,” Reymenants said. Polejaka tugged hard on Reymenants’ lower legs and with a lot of struggle and effort was able to pull him back against a stiff current, inch by inch, for a total of 50 feet. It wasn’t all bad news: Reymenants suspected they’d been sucked into the same bottleneck as the Thai SEALs. If that was true, then they had found the T-junction.

Together, Reymenants and Polejaka resurfaced in an air pocket. The effort had drained Polejaka’s tanks, and he needed to turn around, but Reymenants still had one more bag of line. He recalled a recent conversation with Robert Harper, one of the British cave explorers who remapped the cave in 2015. He’d warned of dead ends but said if Reymenants reached a big room with an air pocket and could find a gravel pathway, he should follow it against the current. Reymenants dropped down to the bottom. Again, the current forced him right, but he fought hard and found a gravel path and with it a colder stream of water. He followed the gravel into a restriction. According to Harper, the proper siphon would be shallow yet wide. This one appeared to be three feet high and about ten feet across, which fit the description. He unfurled and tied off his line and took a compass bearing, then swam back to his friend. Reymenants was 99 percent sure that he and Polejaka had found and pushed past the T-junction. If he was right, the kids were just several hundred feet beyond the end of his rope.

When they surfaced together at base camp, the SEALs confirmed that Reymenants’ compass bearings matched those from their original trip to the T-junction. They had the breakthrough they were looking for. The English team suited up and dropped in. Four hours later, on July 2, the English divers called out from the front of the cave: They’d found the 12 kids and their coach—. The commander of the Thai SEALs found Reymenants and pulled him in for a bear hug.

Celebration faded into concern. The boys had been living in a moist cave environment, breathing air with oxygen levels hovering at 15 percent for ten days. With bad weather creeping into the forecast, there was pressure to act. For days, divers and soldiers prepared and rehearsed the potential recovery. One man, Saman Kunan, a retired Navy SEAL who worked in airport security, while placing oxygen canisters along the line in a siphon. His death was mourned even as 24 men formed a chain and for three days and nights from the darkness back to life.

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±ő°ù±đ±ôČčČÔ»ć’s , freediving’s most accomplished and beloved safety diver, died July 22 from in the Blue Hole, a diving spot in the Red Sea off the coast of Dahab, Egypt. During an epic rescue, he was attempting to assist freediver to the surface from a depth of 50 meters. His was the first recorded death of a safety diver in action in freediving history.

Conditions weren’t ideal in the Egyptian dive mecca on Saturday. Visibility wasn’t good, and the winds were high enough—20 miles per hour—that they were pushing the water around, conjuring currents that could push a freediver off course, especially one who was aiming to traverse the Arch, an 85-foot-long redrock tunnel set 184 feet deep, on a single breath.

It’s one of the more dangerous recreational dives in the sport, but if any woman in the world could do it, it would be Alessia Zecchini of Italy, who for depth achieved on a single breath with a dive of 104 meters (341 feet) last May at theÌę, considered the Wimbledon of freediving. On this day, Zecchini appeared to have been attempting to swim through the length of the Arch and back to the surface without fins, using a modified breast stroke rather than a more-powerful monofin. For safety, she made sure Keenan was tailing her in case anything went wrong.

Keenan was by Zecchini’s side when she snagged her world record last May, which wasn’t all that unusual. He was an icon of the freediving community. If you glimpse recent photographs of freedivers enjoying the foamy celebrations that erupt in record-breaking reverie, Keenan is almost always there. Born and raised near Dublin, Ireland, Keenan fell in love with the sport that would become his life while vacationing in Dahab in 2009. Within a few years, he would relocate there, learn Arabic, become a freediving instructor, and train hundreds of students in Egypt, Spain, and the Philippines. In 2015, Keenan founded with Spain’s , one of the deepest freedivers on earth, and Swiss freediver . That year, Keenan would record his career-best dive with a monofin to 81 meters (267 feet)—well beyond the range of most scuba divers.

But KeeningÌęreally made his name as a safety diver. Freediving competitions are impossible to pull off without the work of a dedicated team of four to five safety divers. Diving is rarely the problem—it’s the ascent. As competitors try to resurface after being submerged for more than two minutes, the partial pressure of oxygen begins to plummet in their bloodstream, putting them at risk for a blackout.

Typically, the deep safety diver will meet a diver at 30 meters (100 feet), with a second safety joining them at 20 meters (66 feet), and a third at ten meters (33 feet). Then, the four will swim to the surface together. Along the way, a safety watches for signs that a diver may be fading and on the verge of a blackout. If the diver does lose consciousness, one or more of the safeties will cover the diver’s nose and mouth—so they don’t get water in their lungs—and ferry them to the surface, where they will revive the diver, usually by blowing on their eyelids and calling their name. If necessary, mouth-to-mouth rescue breaths are employed, and if emergency techniques are implemented correctly, the athlete should come around. Which is why, for all the sport’s perceived danger, there has only ever been one competition fatality: on November 17, 2013, when after a dive in Dean’s Blue Hole at Vertical Blue.

On Saturday, according to multiple sources, Zecchini descended to the mouth of the Arch along a line as planned but became disoriented at depth. Keenan bolted to her aid at a reported 50 meters (164 feet) and began finning her to the surface. Zecchini made it back unscathed, but Keenan blacked out underwater at a depth that remains unknown. He was found floating on the surface, face down and unresponsive. Despite repeated attempts to save his life, he could not be revived.

Keenan’s loss left a void in the freediving community, and an outpouring of emotion surfaced on Facebook all weekend. Athletes, freediving professionals, his students, and neighbors shared their own private moments with Keenan, who was usually grinning ear to ear.

In an online tribute, freediving photographer called Keenan “our best safety diver.”

“You knew he had your back,” says Dr. Kerry Hollowell, an emergency room doc and competitive freediver on the U.S. National Team. “He would not bail on you.”

“He was the heart of the community,” says , who holds the (425 feet). Molchanov witnessed Keenan’s commitment firsthand on his failed 2013 world-record attempt to dive 128 meters (419 feet) in Kalamata, Greece. Molchanov’s inner ear became clogged, and the air he used to equalize his sinuses couldn’t escape, causing vertigo on the ascent. “I remember feeling dizzy and was ascending at half my usual speed,” Molchanov says. Meanwhile, Keenan was suspended at 32 meters (104 feet), searching the limitless blue for more than 40 seconds, his own urge to breathe building.

“I had that horrible situation that a safety always hates,” Keenan told me in 2014 for my book . “You can’t just stay there indefinitely, but you don’t want to leave your man.” When a struggling Molchanov finally came into view, obviously disoriented, he finned down to 40 meters (131 feet). Despite being four inches shorter and 30 pounds lighter, he began swimming Molchanov to the surface. It was a heroic and selfless move. “He waited for me much longer than he should have,” Molchanov says, “but that’s how he was.”

With Keenan’s passing, some are calling for a renewed focus on the well-being of safety divers. “What troubles me most is that this can happen because maybe the attention is on the athlete ‘in trouble,’” says UK record holder . “No one notices the safety diver.”

“Safety diving has always been in the background, and this event will increase vigilance and help us improve safety measures for safety divers, because they can black out too,” Hollowell says. “It also reminds us that no matter how many records or how much experience you have, nobody is immune to death by freediving. That will always be the case for anyone who enters the water, forever.”

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When New Zealander accepted a casual invitation to the , in 2009, she was still rehabbing from a devastating fall down a staircaseÌęthat .ÌęShe wasn’t a serious swimmer, and she had no clue that she would soon fall in love with a torturous adventure sport that would become her life.

In 2014, , an aquatic version of the Seven Summits that involves open-water swims across the English Channel, the Catalina Channel (California), the Kaiwi Channel (between Oahu and Molokai), and the North Channel (between Ireland and England), among others. She’s also the only woman ever to swim to the jigsaw of rock in the Pacific that is the Farallon Islands, a feat she checked off in 2015. Each feat has provided her a platform to highlight and fundraise for a cause—the , the , and —and she’s been careful not to wade directly into politics. Yet the since taking office—and his —has influenced her latest mission: .

“There has been so much negativity, and this is an expression of kindness for those that risk death to flee instability, poverty, and war, in search of a better life for themselves and their children,”ÌęChambers says. “Wouldn’t you do anything for your children?”

On the morning of Cinco de Mayo, from five countries will launch from , the southernmost beach in California, just a few miles from the busiest border crossing in the Western Hemisphere. They’ll swim approximately one kilometerÌęsouth along the coast, past the border, and land at Playas de Tijuana, roughly two-thirds of a mile into Mexico. On the U.S. side, they’ll be flanked by a crew of American kayakers who will carry the swimmer’s passports; once they cross the border they’ll be escorted by a team of Mexican paddlers along with representatives from the Mexican Navy.

“We want to cast a global spotlight on migration, which is a natural thing,”ÌęChambers says. After being raised on a farm in remote New Zealand, Chambers came to the U.S. to attend University of California,ÌęBerkeley. She holds a green card and lives in San Francisco.

The idea for the swim was hatched last February over coffee in Marin County with her friend and occasional swim buddy, South African . Last November, they and 26 others swam nine miles across the Dead Sea, from Jordan to Israel, to raise awareness .ÌęThis time they craved a more visceral topic and, frustrated with the Trump Administration, set their sights on the U.S.-Mexico border, a political lightning rod. “I can’t just stand around and complain. I have to do something,”ÌęChambers says.

Next, Chambers approached another training partner, , 58, from Mexico City, who has made six of the Ocean’s Seven crossings and is planning to swim the North Channel this summer. If he achieves it, ArgĂŒelles will become the first Latin American to bag all seven channels. When he was a boy, ArgĂŒelles used to sell Speedo swim caps and goggles at swim meets, and it was a chance meeting with Speedo executive William Lee, years later, that enabled him to attend Stanford. “My story is one of a kind,” ArgĂŒelles said, “but there are people who are not as lucky as I was.”

The team was rounding out. Three Israelis, two South Africans and four Americans, including two-time Catalina Channel finisher, Dan Simonelli, 51, joined up. The group partnered with the , an organization in Arizona that helps families of those who have gone missing in the borderlands find their loved ones.

The swimmers, however, aren’t interested in promoting policy. “It’s about having empathy for others who are struggling,”Ìęsaid Chambers. “Ignoring human suffering is something that those of us in privileged societies should not allow…I think under certain circumstances migration should be considered a human right.”

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On the morning of Tuesday, January 31, filmmaker and shark conservationist Rob Stewart boarded a dive boat docked at Caloosa Cove Marina on the tiny isle of Islamorada, just south of Key Largo. The 37-year-old had one goal, to find the elusive sawfish, an impossibly cute, cartoonish creature of the deep with the body of a shark and a beak that best resembles a chainsaw. Sawfish are shy and easily scared off by the stream of bubbles and Darth Vader-eque growl that comes from a scuba rig. On Tuesday, Stewart would be diving with a rebreather, a closed circuit system that recycles the carbon dioxide a diver exhales into breathable air. Which means stealthy, silent swimming without bubbles.

The rebreather Stewart was using looks like a suitcase with shoulder straps and an inflatable wing. It enabled him to go deeper and explore his maximum depth longer with less decompression time than other technical diving rigs. An experienced diver with hundreds if not thousands of dives in his logbook, Stewart was new to rebreathers. More than a month before setting sail to find the sawfish, on December 19, : “looking for a rebreather dive ninja mid January in Florida for some 300ft dives
”

By January he’d connected with an instructor named Peter Sotis who owns Add Helium, a dive shop in Ft. Lauderdale. According to a since-deleted Facebook post, Sotis put Stewart through a rebreather tri-mix course in late January. On January 31, Stewart and his friend and collaborator Brock Cahill chartered a dive boatÌęthrough Horizon Divers, a dive shop in Key Largo, intending to visit the Queen of Nassau wreck. Sotis as well as theÌęboat’s owner, Dan Dawson,Ìęjoined them.

Conditions were ideal: a refreshing 10-to-12-knot breeze was blowing and the azure ocean rippled with a mellow swell of 1-to-3 feet. Donning dry suits, Sotis and Stewart dropped into blue water, descending to 230 feet. Stewart brought his camera with him as they finned down toward the 111-year-old Canadian steamship, its skeleton encrusted with coral. The purpose was to shoot footage for Stewart’s next project, a documentary called Sharkwater Extinction, the sequel to his 2007 award-winning film, , which received broad acclaim for revealing shark finning to a wide audience. It not only made him a celebrity in the marine and conservation community but inspired global efforts to ban shark-finning.

Stewart and Sotis dove the wreck three times that day. They were the deepest dives of Stewart’s life. The two men surfaced for the final time just after 5 p.m. within sight of the dive boat’s crew members. Stewart gave the OK sign. Sotis, however, appeared shaky as he climbed aboard the boat. Moments later, he blacked out. The crew retrieved bottled oxygen to revive him. In the commotion, they turned theirÌębacks to the water, andÌęwhenÌęthey again looked for StewartÌęin the water, he was gone. The crew radioed for help immediately. Within five minutes, a Navy helicopter was dispatched and Coast Guard cutter Sexton was diverted to the scene, along with a small boat crew and an HH-65 helicopter from Miami.

Stewart, born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, always loved the ocean. At his behest, he, his parents, and his older sister all got Professional Association of Diving Instructors-certified for his thirteenth birthday. “For the next 15 years, all of our family vacations were dive vacations,” Alexandra Stewart, Rob’s sister, told șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. “It was such an overwhelming passion for him, and he was so good at it he made the beauty of diving accessible to us. It was clear that [diving] was going to be a huge driver in his personal and professional life.”

Stewart went on to study biology at Ontario’s Western University and traveled whenever he could. He blossomed into a formidable photographer and cameraman, eventually landing in Los Angeles. Young, handsome, passionate, and skilled, he found a mentor in the legendary anti-poaching activist Captain Paul Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd, the global anti-poaching armada known for its defense of whales and campaigns against illegal fishing worldwide.

Stewart boarded Sea Shepherd’s Ocean Warrior in 2002 to film Watson in his element, battling Costa Rican shark poachers. Watson and his team had showered the poachersÌęwith water cannons, slammed into their vessel, and attempted to take control of their boat. Both men, with the rest of the Ocean Warrior crew, were subsequently arrested by Costa Rican authorities for attempted murder as a result. They slipped custody and used the footage to expose a vast international and illegal shark-finning cartel.

ThatÌęfootage is some of the most compelling action in Sharkwater, Stewart's 2006 acclaimed documentary, which explains how the ocean’s apex predator has driven the evolution of marine species for over 400 million years and plays a pivotal role in climate stabilization (by feeding on species that eat plankton, which transform carbon dioxide into oxygen).ÌęIt was a visually striking portrayal: early on in the film, Stewart kneels on the sea floor, petting sharks swirling around and nuzzling him.

“You’re told your whole life since you were a kid, sharks are dangerous,” Stewart narrates. “You’re warned not to go adventuring too far out into the ocean, but then finally
 you see the thing you were taught your whole life to fear, and it’s perfect, and it doesn’t want to hurt you, and it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. And your whole world changes.”

“He wanted to show that the shark was a beautiful creature, essential to our ecosystem and not to be feared,” Watson said in a phone interview on Thursday. “It presented sharks in a new light and changed the perspective of millions of people.”

Sharkwater was screened in dozens of film festivals around the world, and Stewart made the rounds, wracking up awards and television appearances. “It made a huge impact,” said David McGuire, founder of the San Francisco nonprofit Shark Stewards. “It is still the most influential anti-shark-finning film.”

Due in part to the film’s release, global trade in shark finning in the past decade has been reduced by a third, according to McGuire. In Hong Kong, McGuire estimates the shark fin trade has been cut in half. China no longer serves shark fin soup at state dinners, and Air China, DHL, and UPS have all banned shark fin transport. So has COSCO, one of the world’s largest ocean shipping conglomerates. “We’re winning the battles,” McGuire said, “but we haven’t won the war.”

Last November, around the time he discovered an illegal blue shark trade in Cape Verde, Stewart decided it was time for a follow-up documentary. In an , he said up to 1,500 blue sharks were being caught each day and shipped to plants in Spain to be ground into pet food. Filming was set to wrap in the coming weeks, with a premiere planned for the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

Authorities searched for Stewart all Tuesday night. By Wednesday morning a fixed-wing aircraft was added to the fleet, augmented by 20 volunteer boat crews, including the John Paul Dejoria, Sea Shepherd’s newest member of its fleet, and 12 civilian aircraft—among them Richard Branson’s helicopter and Jimmy Buffet’s private plane. Thirteen scuba divers searched for him too, though they were unable to reach the bottom due to visibility issues. The search continued into Thursday when the U.S.ÌęBorder Patrol deployed a remotely operated vehicle (ROV)Ìęcapable of lifting up to 200 pounds on the ocean floor. In 48 hours, crews scoured more than 1,300 square miles to no avail.

Coast Guard Captain Jeffrey Janszen, commander of the search and rescue operation, said Thursday that he was confident in their search pattern, which was based on Stewart’s last known position and dictated by both computer models of current and weather patterns and a self-locating buoy that was deployed in the minutes after he went missing. “Based on real time data, that [buoy] is drifting smack in the middle of our search pattern,” Janszen said Thursday. “We’re saturating the area.”

Stewart’s parents arrived in the Keys on Wednesday morning, they appeared desperate and confused in a Canadian television interview in which they appealed for volunteers to help with the search. Tech divers I spoke to during the search reiterated one question about the circumstances of Stewart’s disappearance: Why had Stewart and Sotis attempted three deco dives (meaning deep dives that carry a greater risk of decompression sickness) in one day? Most experienced rebreather divers would attempt two such dives at most.

“When you use a rebreather, you have to start from scratch,” said Simon Liddiard, owner of Blue Marlin Dive in Indonesia and a rebreather instructor for 20 years, when asked about Stewart’s disappearance. “It doesn’t matter how many years you’ve been a diver. You have zero experience.” Liddiard explained that it’s easy for beginners to accidentally flood the breathing loop, which can drag a diver down. Mixing the gases is also potentially dangerous: if a diver were to accidentally breathe hypoxic gas at the surface, he could black out and sink.

The search continued until 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday, when Captain Janszen issued an order to suspend it. Crews had been searching nonstop for 72 hours, and according to Janszen, Stewart had “reached the end of feasible survivability.”

Minutes later, a dive team from Key Largo Fire and Rescue found Stewart’s body. It was 300 feet from his last known position, on the bottom of the ocean floor.

On Thursday, Stewart's sister, Alexandra, reminisced about diving in Boanaire, the Cayman Islands, and even Lake Muskoka, north of Toronto. “The whole family love water and nature,” she said, “but he was so passionate. Once he took us swimming and showed us the most amazing little seahorse hiding in the crack of a monolithic [cement] dock.” Along with helping to curb shark finning, perhaps that’s his legacy. In death as in life, Rob Stewart was an interpreter of the ocean’s beautiful secrets.

Adam Skolnick is a tech, scuba and free diver, and the author of .

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Freedivers routinely hold their breath for over four minutes while diving to depths beyond 300 feet, where barometric pressure can reduce their lungs to the size of nectarines. For decades, the sport's very bestÌęhave heard dire warnings from doctors and scientists about the unknown, potential health risks;Ìęeach time they’ve tuned them out, doveÌędeeper, and held their breath longer, stretching the boundaries of medical science. But this month, researchers at the University of Bonn, in Germany, have that freedivers’ hearts may be at risk each time they take the plunge.

Each time a diver holds his or her breath for an extended period, the study says,Ìęthe body undergoes involuntary systemic changes to sustain consciousness. Blood vessels constrict in the arms and legs and dilate in the heart and brain, funneling oxygen-rich blood to the cerebral cortex. The diver’s pulse also plummets to half an athlete’s resting heart rate (which is about 40 beats per minute). Although these effects have been recorded in previous studies during static breath-holds at the surface, the study found thatÌęthe effects are maximized when a diver goes deep. The same thing occurs in dolphins and seals, which led scientists to dub it the “mammalian dive reflex” in the 1960s.

The Bonn researchers observed 17 freedivers, ranging in age from 23 to 58 years old, as they held their breath for as long as possible while laying face up on an MRI bed. In addition to monitoring brain activity, researchers, led by anesthesiologist Lars Eichhorn (himself aÌęfreediver), recorded oxygen saturation and blood pressure and took electro cardiograms. The idea was to develop a research protocol for studying the relationship between the heart and the brain during long breath-holds. But the study evolved into something unexpected when Eichhorn himself was loaded into the MRI machine and proceeded to hold his breath for more than eight minutes.Ìę

“What we noticed,” Eichhorn said, was that, for all the ways that the mammalian dive reflex is designed to keep a person conscious, “it might also cause arrythmia [or an abnormal heart rhythm] and other problems for the heart.”

Prior to his research career, Eichhorn was a competitive freediver, and has a personal best static breath-hold of over nine minutes. That’s world-class. Static is one of six competitive freediving disciplines. All an athlete has to do is take a deep breath and go face down in the pool; it’s both the simplestÌęand arguably the most painful of the disciplines. Holding for two or three minutes is doable for most nascent freedivers, but holding beyond five minutes requires deep relaxation, many hours of training, and a special brand of pain tolerance. Tension in the muscles supercharges oxygen demand, andÌęthe risk of a black-out rises as oxygenÌędwindles. Then there are the repeated muscle contractions: as seconds turn to minutes and carbon dioxide builds up in the blood, the diaphragm and intercostal muscles do their best to force the bodyÌęto take another breath. Those involuntary contractions can feel like a swift kick to the groin.

After Eichhorn’s breath-hold in the MRI, he and his colleagues watched the footage. “My left ventricle was quite enlarged and the pumping [rhythm] wasn’t right,” he said. In a healthy heart, parts of cardiac muscle tissue overlap as the heart beats. But that wasn’t happening with Eichhorn. Claas NĂ€hle, head of the cardiac magnetic resonance research group where the study took place, entered the monitoring room out of curiosity while Eichhorn was reviewing his time inside the MRI, and noticed it immediately.

“Wow, that guy’s really ill, isn’t he?” Nahle asked.Ìę

“No,” Eichhorn replied. “It’s me!” Yet even he couldn’t deny the fact that his heart looked like that of a patient in the throes of systolic heart failure. Intrigued, NĂ€hle joined the research team.

One by one, the 17 athletes came through the laboratory, holding their breath for an average of five minutes, and each time researchers saw the same effect: enlarged ventricles, a significant decrease in fractional shortening (that overlap of the heart tissue), and hypoxia (a lack of oxygen in the system). The divers all recovered normal heart function within minutes after they began breathing again.

Eichhorn is not ready to sound the alarm and say that serious freediversÌęare in immediate or long-term danger. “At the moment we have no evidence of any long-term effects,” he said. However, beginners with pre-existing heart problems are more concerning, Eichhorn said. Long breath-holds “could be harmful for improperly trained divers or people with cardiac or other medical conditions,” according to the study. So before you think about going on a recreational freedive, see your doctor.Ìę

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