By the time we鈥檇 reached the bottom of the Cayman Trench, some 2,000 feet below the ocean鈥檚 surface, I鈥檇 lost feeling in my legs. My neck was aching, and my ears felt as though they were going to explode under the mounting pressure. 鈥淗eavy,鈥� said the passenger sitting next to me. He stared out the window with shell-shocked eyes, and I looked, too. A Milky Way of multicolored stars twinkled in blue, violet, and white as far as we could see, like fireworks in a night sky. But these were no fireworks, and the view was no starscape.

What we were seeing were the bioluminescent emissions from tens of thousands of plankton, cephalopods, and who knows what else. This is what the world looks like at the ocean鈥檚 sunless depths.

I鈥檇 come here because I wanted to see where the planet鈥檚 largest collection of organisms called home. I wanted to explore one of the last frontiers on earth.

This was more than ten years ago. Back then, regular folk weren鈥檛 talking about vacations to the deep ocean, let alone booking trips to it. There were no sanctioned tours or government-licensed operators to take you. The only way for a private citizen like me to get down there was to either save up several million dollars and purchase a custom-built submersible, or fly to Honduras and meet with the renegade undersea explorer Karl Stanley. I chose the second option.

Stanley had hand-built his own submarine, the Idabel, without any formal training and without any government oversight. Because taking tourists down 70 stories in a homemade, unlicensed submarine, without insurance, was a liability nightmare, Stanley moved his operation to Roatan, Honduras, where regulations for underwater craft were lax or nonexistent, and deep water is close to shore. He ran his submarine business off a tiny dock along Roatan鈥檚 touristy West End, between a few sand-floored tiki bars serving pink slushy drinks and packs of stray dogs picking through trash heaps.

Stanley had completed more than 2,000 dives in his little homemade sub. Along the way, he had some close calls. Like the one time in an earlier sub when he got stuck in a cave and snagged on a rope. Or another when a window cracked at 1,960 feet as he carried a local from Roatan and the man鈥檚 pregnant wife. Dangers aside, thus far Stanley had chalked up more time exploring the deep waters between 1,000 and 2,000 feet than anyone in history.

To join him on a deep-sea adventure, I鈥檇 need to autograph no waiver, wear no helmet, strap on no seat belt. I just needed to show up at a dock at the end of a dusty dirt road with several hundred dollars and an empty bladder. I signed up. Soon after, I was 200 stories beneath the ocean, witnessing lifeforms that put Avatar to shame.

Today there are more than 200 private submersibles operating around the world and a dozen companies selling tours to the sunless depths. The deep ocean has finally become accessible to anyone who wants to go there. What could go wrong? Even back then, I knew the answer: just about everything.

A Year After the Titan Disaster

It鈥檚 been a year since the world saw exactly how lethal these deep-sea voyages can be. On June 18, 2023, the private submersible Titan launched five men on an expedition to view the wreckage of the Titanic, which is roughly 400 off the coast of Newfoundland. The dive was supposed to take a few hours and reach a depth of more than 12,000 feet. But 105 minutes after the Titan ducked below the waves, it went dark.

The U.S. and Canadian Coast Guards and the U.S. Navy were called in on a frantic search to rescue the passengers, only to discover days later that the Titan had imploded. There were no survivors.

The Titan disaster made international headlines for more than a week. Soon millions of people around the world were talking about submersibles and debating the merits of manned exploration to the ocean鈥檚 depths.

On various social media platforms, many people wrote condolences to the families of the deceased passengers. Many more mocked the whole enterprise. I saw people label the passengers 鈥渄aredevils,鈥� 鈥渇ools,鈥� 鈥渁rrogant,鈥� 鈥渋diotic,鈥� and worse. Several journalists (rightfully) lambasted media outlets for focusing on the lives of five wealthy men lost at sea while 700 migrants drowned in the Aegean Sea a few days after the Titan was lost. The comments and derisions continue to this day. I should know. I鈥檝e been on the receiving end of some of them.

I鈥檝e since spent a decade praising undersea explorers and arguing the importance of visiting the ocean鈥檚 depths. Several people scolded me, explaining how manned deep-sea pursuits were not only dangerous and expensive, but also pointless.

They argued that in the age of robotic drones, cameras, cables, and computers, no human needs to go down there again. We can explore the planet鈥檚 secret wonders in HD from the comfort and safety of a climate-controlled office. Why bother boarding a sub? Why go deep?

And so I find myself here, defending the human compulsion to explore. You know, that messy, tactile, anything-can-happen kind of exploration we used to be proud of. The kind that shot us to the moon. That brought us across oceans to new worlds. That led us out of caves.

Without that kind of exploration, a scientist can鈥檛 prove theories and a journalist can鈥檛 tell rich stories. I鈥檝e learned over the past 20 years, through much trial and error, that the only way to really write about a subject is to know it; the only way to know it is to experience it; and the only way to experience it is to show up.

The road to discovery, I鈥檝e learned, is long and hard and filled with frustration, wandering, and dead ends. It鈥檚 expensive and too often feels fruitless. Which is the whole point. I believe that casting a wide net and blindly trying to follow leads is an essential part of the discovery process.

The Merits of Showing Up

Anyone with a computer can view HD virtual tours of the Louvre, the pyramids of Giza, and Pisa鈥檚 leaning tower. Yet that kind of tourism hasn鈥檛 overtaken our collective desire to experience things in person. Families this summer and last have, in record numbers, chosen to spend weeks on the road and thousands of dollars adventuring to these landmarks in person. Business travel also stormed back as soon as airports reopened, and bars, clubs, and restaurants in many cities have become packed to the gills.

After a few years of lockdown, of experiencing life on Zoom, human beings are flocking to IRL experiences. The metaverse is a failed, desolate wasteland, and virtual cocktail parties have gone the way of Iggy Azalea.

As wasteful, time-consuming, and seemingly pointless as it may seem, even bean counters and glad-handers realized that the best experiences in business, science, journalism鈥攁nd life in general鈥攃an only be had in person. This is what the submarine skeptics seem to be forgetting.

The U.S. Navy submersible Alvin has made more than 5,000 dives in the past five decades at depths below 20,000 feet. While researchers were putzing around the Gal谩pagos Rift in Alvin, they witnessed giant 鈥渃hemosynthetic鈥� tube worms, the first life-forms ever observed to exist entirely without the need for sunlight鈥攐ne of the most significant biological discoveries. It was in Alvin that researchers recovered a 1.45 megaton hydrogen bomb that had been lost over the Mediterranean Sea in 1966.

It was in another submersible that scientists caught the first footage of a giant squid鈥攁 massive, mythic creature that no human had ever witnessed in the wild before. The list goes on and on, and includes hundreds of supposedly impossible discoveries made during deep and dangerous dives into the ocean. Discoveries that were made by showing up. One sub captain told me that on every dive they discovered something new.

Certainly, the passengers aboard the Titan weren鈥檛 on a serious scientific or journalistic mission of discovery. They were on a joyride to see the remains of history鈥檚 most famous shipwreck. But they were moved by the compulsion to explore. We can have the debate about how deep a submersible can safely go, which safety precautions should be required, who ought to be trusted to build and captain them. Those are worthy discussions, and there are people above my pay grade who should have them.

I鈥檓 not against rules and regulations, either鈥攔ather, it鈥檚 the idea that we should avoid certain kinds of exploration that irks me. I believe that the only real way to experience life and truly connect with the ineffable, otherworldly wonders of the world is to experience them in person. I learned this valuable lesson in those sunless depths, 2,000 feet below the waves.

The View At the Bottom

A carnival of the bizarre danced outside my porthole ten years ago during that submarine dive in Honduras. We鈥檇 just touched down on a sandy dune below 2,000 feet. On the other side of the window, a fish with stumpy legs waddled past another fish covered in brown blotches, yawning with pouty Mick Jagger lips.

Minutes later, a beach-ball-size orb appeared a few inches from the glass鈥攁 jellyfish, I think鈥攅mitting flashes of bright pink and purple light like some kind of underwater disco ball. First only blue lights flashed, then red, then purple, then yellow, until every color in the spectrum had appeared. After that, all the colors appeared at the same time, and the spectacle was repeated. The hundreds of rows of lights were evenly spaced around the glob. It looked like a cityscape after nightfall. When the lights were red, they looked like the taillights of cars on a freeway; when they were white, they looked like an urban grid as viewed from an airplane thousands of feet above.

Between the lights there was nothing鈥攏o visible flesh, nerves, bones, or body. And there it was, this thing, two feet from our faces, at a depth equivalent to twice the height of the Chrysler Building, watching us with its non-eyes, communicating with its non-brain, and dazzling us with its Las Vegas lights.

I realized that not only had no human ever seen these animals, but that these creatures had never seen themselves. The ocean down there was completely black; the only way we could see anything, and they could see us, was through the glare of the submarine鈥檚 headlights. These animals had been evolving at these depths for millions of years; we鈥檇 been evolving on land for just as long. And here we were sharing space for the first time.

Beyond witnessing these life-forms, I wondered how else our presence might be interacting with theirs, what other information we might be broadcasting to one another.

As I sat there cramped in a tiny metal sub pondering all this, I felt an emptiness in my chest that breath couldn鈥檛 fill. The undersea is the largest living space on the planet, the 71 percent silent majority. And this is how it looks鈥攇elatinous, cross-eyed, clumsy, glowing, flickering, cloaked in perpetual darkness, and compressed by more than 1,000 pounds per square inch.
I鈥檇 love to share with you some pictures or videos from my sub experience, but I didn鈥檛 take any. I was too busy being gobsmacked by wonders of the natural world and our place within it.

I guess you had to be there.

James Nestor is the author of . This essay was adapted from the book. 听

The post The Ocean Floor Is Dangerous. We Should Keep Exploring It. appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

I鈥檓 in the passenger seat of a white van, on a dusty, potholed road somewhere along the northeastern coast of Sri Lanka. It鈥檚 9:00 p.m. and the stars are out. 鈥淚s this the right way?鈥� I ask our driver.

He鈥檚 a local named Bobby; that isn鈥檛 his real name, but that鈥檚 what he wants me to call him. Bobby is shaking his head and flashing me a reassuring smile. It鈥檚 the same smile he used ten minutes ago when he took a wrong turn into someone鈥檚 front yard, the same one he gave me twenty minutes before that when he brought the van to a dead stop in the middle of a two-lane freeway, stepped out into oncoming traffic, and ran across the street to ask a barefoot man on a bike for directions.

鈥淏obby? Is this the right way?鈥� I repeat.

That smile.

Then Bobby suddenly pulls into a driveway. Through the headlights, it looks like we鈥檝e just pulled into a junkyard. Twelve hours driving through steep mountain roads, jungles thick with elephants, and dusty towns filled with men in baggy slacks selling boiled peanuts and green bananas 鈥� and now this.

鈥淏辞产产测?鈥�

He pulls out of the driveway and takes a left. This road is narrower and bumpier. Bushes scrape the doors. The eyes of unknown animals glow from copses of coconut palms. A dog barks. Bats the size of rats flutter and swoop inches from the windshield.

Minutes later, we come to a stop in a barren sandlot. To the right is a creepy-looking, three-story pink-concrete building. A single, bare light bulb shines over a white plastic table on the patio, giving the scene an Edward Hopper feel. Bobby exhales, pulls the key from the ignition, and smiles. We鈥檝e arrived at our destination, he says: the Pigeon Island View Guesthouse.

That evening, after days of air travel from five different points of the globe, the whale search party has gathered and we are all sitting together around the patio table. On one side sits the expedition leader, Fabrice Schn枚ller, and Guy Gazzo, a 74-year-old freediving legend, both from Reunion Island, a French outpost located 400 miles east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Across the table is South Africa national-record holding freediver, Hanli Prinsloo, and her aquatic he-man boyfriend, a world-champion swimmer from Los Angeles named Peter Marshall. Belgian photographer, Jean-Marie Ghislain, sits next to Prinsloo. Ghislain tells the group that he has just returned from a trip in Botswana to swim with crocodiles. The trip ended after the first day when a team member had his arm eaten off.

Thirty years ago to the week an American film crew came to this spot 鈥� Trincomalee, Sri Lanka 鈥� and captured the first footage of sperm whales in their natural habitat. The resulting film, Whales Weep Not, narrated by Jason Robards, became an international sensation and helped spark the movement.

Schn枚ller and his crew hope to have a similar impact by capturing the first 3-D footage of sperm whales and human-and-whale freediving interactions which Schn枚ller will use an upcoming documentary. We'll also be recording audio data for a group of researchers in France who are trying to decipher the sperm whale click language.

But for any of this to work we鈥檒l first need to find some whales.

Schn枚ller, who is 45 years old and wears an uncombed swatch of short gray hair and oversize multicolored shorts, first swam with sperm whales in 2007. He was sailing with a friend from his home in Reunion to neighboring Mauritius, when a pod approached the boat. Schn枚ller grabbed a mask, snorkel, and fins, and jumped in. Within a half hour the pod surrounded him. Then they oriented their bodies vertically, like obelisks, and stared up with wide eyes. They began echolocating his body; Schn枚ller could feel their echolocation vocalizations, called clicks, penetrate his flesh and vibrate through his bones, his chest cavity. The whales stayed with him for two hours.

Six months after the encounter, Schn枚ller sold his lumber store and dedicated his life to trying to understand these animals. He built his own A/V equipment to record sperm whale behavior and communication. to help him crack their 鈥渉idden language.鈥�

In the five years since he began, Schn枚ller and his team 鈥� none of whom have had any formal research experience or even hold scientific degrees 鈥� have collected the largest database of sperm whale behavior and vocalizations in history.

What's given them such intimate and immediate access is that they are the only researchers in the field willing to swim with whales. More specifically, they are the only researchers freediving to -40 feet and below, then swimming in whales' deep-sea turf.

鈥淛ane Goodall didn鈥檛 study apes from a plane,鈥� said Schn枚ller. 鈥淎nd so you can鈥檛 expect to study the ocean and its animals from a classroom. You鈥檝e got to get in there. You鈥檝e got to get wet.鈥� Schn枚ller鈥檚 renegade band believes that the only way to crack the sperm whale language code, and to truly understand these animals, is by diving with them face-to-face.

This balls-to-the-wall approach puts traditional ocean scientists at a disadvantage. No university or institution would permit its employees to motor miles out to sea in a beat-up boat off the coast of a developing country to swim with sperm whales, which can grow up to 125,000 pounds and 60 feet in length and are the largest predators on Earth. And, freediving isn鈥檛 a course offered with most ocean-based PhD鈥檚. Few students would want to take the course if it were. Freediving requires months to years of training to master. And if all the training is successful, it would only bring researchers within chomping distance of the four dozen seven-inch-long teeth that line the sperm whale mouth.

Not getting crushed, drowned, or eaten by sperm whales is only one of the challenges of studying them. Another is actually finding the animals. Sperm whales migrate from the north and south poles towards the warmer waters along the equator every summer. If you're lucky enough to see a pod, chances are you鈥檒l never get close enough to dive with them. Schn枚ller predicts he sees sperm whales about 1 percent of the time he鈥檚 at sea looking for them; he鈥檒l dive with them about 1 percent of the time he sees them. In other words, this is hard work with few rewards. It鈥檚 made even harder by the fact that most countries with coastlines prohibit swimming with sperm whales.

In late 2012, Schn枚ller heard that huge pods of sperm whales were congregating off the coast off Trincomalee, a Podunk town along the northeast coast of Sri Lanka. In fact, the whales were regulars in this spot. They've come each spring to hunt, socialize, and mate in the Trincomalee Canyon, an eight-thousand-foot-deep chasm that stretches twenty-five miles across the Indian Ocean, from the northern tip of the country into the Trincomalee harbor. They've come here each spring from around March through August for as long as anyone can remember, and probably for millions of years before that.

Best of all, researching sperm whales in these waters was easy 鈥� there are no permits required, no authorities to evade, no cruise ships, no recreational swimmers or divers, no whale-watching industry to speak of. Over the course of a few months in 2012 and 2013, Schn枚ller shook loose enough funding to send him and a team of expert freedivers to the Trincomalee Canyon for a ten-day expedition in March 2013. He asked if I wanted to come along.

Our first two days treading the Trincomalee Canyon are a disaster. We spend them in two tiny, shadeless fishing boats juddering around the ocean without seeing any whales. The film crew鈥檚 cameraman gets seasick the first day and refuses to go back out. Without a cameraman, and still without any usable footage, the documentary director threatens to pull the plug on the documentary.

On the evening of the second day, I meet Schn枚ller on the second-story patio. He鈥檚 sitting alone, haloed in mosquitoes. The blue fluorescent beam of a headlamp shines down on a table filled with half-assembled underwater-camera casings. Behind him, a waxing moon hangs low over a tinseled sea.

鈥淭his is very hard work, you see,鈥� he says, looking up as I take a seat at the table. He鈥檚 wearing an American flag headband and knockoff Facebook sandals that he picked up at a junk store on the way here, and he looks as ridiculous as that description makes him sound. 鈥淥cean research takes patience, lots of patience, persistence, and is very physically exhausting.鈥�

Schn枚ller grew up in the west African nation of Gabon, the son of a former French army lieutenant who worked for then dictator Omar Bongo. The family鈥檚 house was located beneath a canopy of mango trees at the shoreline of an unpopulated beach, which was where Schn枚ller spent much of his youth. He told me earlier how he remembered watching crocodiles from a nearby river crawl up the front porch and eat food from the dog bowl. Sometimes while the family was eating dinner, giant mambas would slide in through wooden planks in the roof and drop down on the dining-room table. Schn枚ller鈥檚 father kept a shotgun close by, and after a few years, the roof was peppered with holes.

On weekends, Schn枚ller would sail along Gabon鈥檚 wild coast and make camp on unexplored islands. He learned how to navigate through the ocean鈥檚 many moods, keep cool in crises, and improvise his way out of trouble. He learned to be patient.

鈥淭here are no fast results in this research,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 why so few people bother doing it.鈥�

Actually, he corrects himself, nobody is doing it.

Of the twenty or so sperm whale scientists in the field, none dive, film, or interact with their subjects. Schn枚ller finds this inconceivable. 鈥淗ow do you study sperm whale behavior without seeing them behave, without seeing them communicate?鈥� He鈥檚 convinced that to understand sperm whales, one must first understand their communication, and to understand their communication, one needs to understand their language, which he believes is transmitted through clicks.

The idea that sperm whales and other cetaceans (dolphins, belugas, orcas, etc) share some form of sophisticated communication is not a New Age theory, and it's not as nuts as it sounds.

At 17 pounds, the sperm whale has brains that are five times the size of ours; it's the largest brain ever to have know to have existed on Earth. The sperm whale's neocortex, which governs higher-level functions in humans such as conscious thought, future planning, and language, is estimated to be about six times larger than ours. Sperm whales also have spindle cells, the long and highly developed brain structures that neurologists have long associated with speech and feelings of compassion, love, suffering, and intuition 鈥� those things that make humans human. Sperm whales not only have spindle cells, but they had them in far greater concentration than humans. Furthermore, scientific evidence suggest that they evolved them more than 15 million years before us. In the realm of brain evolution, 15 million years is a very long time.

Sperm whales are the loudest animals on earth. Their vocalizations are loud enough to be heard several hundred miles away, and possibly around the globe. At their maximum level of 236 decibels, these clicks are louder than two thousand pounds of TNT exploding two hundred feet away from you, and much louder than the space shuttle taking off from two hundred and fifty feet away. Sperm whale clicks could not only blow out human eardrums from hundreds of feet away, but vibrate a human body to pieces. The extraordinary power of clicks lets whales use them to perceive an intimately detailed view of their environment from great distances. They can detect a ten-inch-long squid at a distance of more than a thousand feet and a human from more than a mile away. Sperm whales鈥� echolocation is the most precise and powerful form of biosonar ever discovered.

Not only are sperm whale vocalizations extremely loud; they are also incredibly organized. They sound unremarkable to the human ear 鈥� something like the tack-tack-tack of a few dozen typewriters 鈥� but when slowed down and viewed as a sound wave on a spectrogram, clicks, which range in length from 24 o 72 milliseconds (thousands of a second), reveal an incredibly complex collection of shorter clicks woven within them. Inside one click is a series of smaller clicks, inside those smaller clicks yet even smaller clicks, and so on, each unfolding like a Russian nesting doll.

Sperm whales transmit these clicks at very specific and distinct frequencies, and can replicate them down to the exact millisecond and frequency, over and over again. They can control the millisecond-long intervals inside the clicks and reorganize them into different structures, in the same way a composer might revise a scale of notes in a piano concerto. But sperm whales can make elaborate revisions to their click patterns then play them back in the space of a few thousands of a second.

鈥淭hese patterns are very structured; this is not random,鈥� says Schn枚ller, taking a sip of beer. The only reason sperm whales would have such incredibly complex vocalizations, Schn枚ller suggests, is if they were using them in some form of communication.

Schn枚ller isn鈥檛 alone. Most marine biologists believe that sperm whales are in fact communicating through their clicks. They just have no idea what they鈥檙e saying. Schn枚ller hopes to be the first.

鈥淲hen you think about it, human language is very inefficient, it is very prone to errors,鈥� Schn枚ller says. Humans use phonemes鈥攂asic units of sound, like kah, puh, ah, tee鈥攖o create words, sentences, and, ultimately, meaning. (English has about forty-two phonemes, which speakers shuffle around to create tens of thousands of words.) While we can usually convey phonemes clearly enough for others to understand them, we can never fully replicate them the same way each time we speak. The frequency, volume, and clarity of the voice shifts constantly, so that the same word uttered twice in a row by the same person will usually sound discernibly different, and will always show clear differences when viewed on a computer. Comprehension in human language is based on proximity: If you enunciate clearly enough, another speaker of the same language will understand you; if you bungle too many vowels and consonants, or even pronunciation (think of French or a tonal Asian language), then communication is lost.

Schn枚ller鈥檚 research suggests that sperm whales don鈥檛 have this problem. If they鈥檙e using these clicks as a form of communication, he believes, it would be less like human language and more like fax-machine transmissions, which work by sending out microsecond-length tones across a phone line to a receiving machine, which processes those tones into words and pictures. (Perhaps it鈥檚 no coincidence that a pod of socializing sperm whales sounds a lot like a fax transmission.)

Human language is analogue; sperm whale language may be digital.

鈥淲hy do they have such huge brains, why are these patterns so consistent and perfectly organized, if they aren鈥檛 some kind of communication?鈥� Schn枚ller asks rhetorically. He mentions that sperm whales have more brain mass and brain cells controlling language than humans do. 鈥淚 know, I know, this is all just theory, but still, when you think about it, it just doesn鈥檛 make sense otherwise.鈥�

To illustrate his point, Schn枚ller relates an encounter he had the previous year with a pod of sperm whales. The pod whales, both adults and their young, were hanging out in the water, clicking and socializing, when Schn枚ller approached them with a camera attached to a bodysurfing board. A calf swam over and faced Schn枚ller, then took the camera in its mouth. A group of adults immediately surrounded the calf and showered it with clicks. Seconds later, the calf let the camera go, then backed up and retreated behind the adults without ever looking at them. To Schn枚ller, the young whale looked ashamed. 鈥淚t got the message not to mess with us.鈥� He laughs. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 when I knew, they had to be talking to it. There鈥檚 just no other way.鈥�

Schn枚ller says he鈥檚 also witnessed, on numerous occasions, two sperm whales clicking back and forth to each other as if they were having a conversation. He鈥檚 seen other whales pass clicks and then suddenly move in the same direction. He鈥檚 watched a whale bend its head in exaggerated motions to face one whale head-on and pass one pattern of clicks, and then bend in another direction to face another whale and pass a completely different pattern. To Schn枚ller, it all looked like they were talking.

But neither Schn枚ller nor anyone else will be translating the cetacean language anytime soon. It鈥檚 too complicated, and both resources and personnel are too scarce to study it closely. The DareWin team has come here to collect data in the hope of simply proving that sperm whales use clicks as some form of communication. They鈥檒l record as much sperm whale socializing as they can, then correlate coda clicks with specific behaviors. The crazy-looking pod at Schn枚ller鈥檚 feet, called a SeaX Sense 4-D, uses a underwater-camera housing with twelve minicameras and four hydrophones to document the sperm whale interactions in high-definition audio and video, in all directions at once.

Nobody has ever recorded sperm whale interactions and behaviors with such sensitive equipment before, because no such equipment had existed. And even if it had, academic and institutional scientists couldn鈥檛 get in the water to use it because none freedives with whales. Schn枚ller and his crew are allowed such intimate access to whales because they approach them in their natural, most unthreatening forms, by freediving with them. The whales don鈥檛 scare off, they don鈥檛 swim away, and they don鈥檛 attack. They become curious. Often, the whales welcome him and other freedivers into their pods and try to communicate with them.

At seven in the morning on the third day, the boat captains arrive and lead us back to our hired beat-up 鈥渞esearch vessels 鈥� two decades-old pangas with wooden planks for seats.鈥�

I鈥檒l be on a boat with Hanli Prinsloo, Peter Marshall, and Jean-Marie Ghislain. The plan is for the two boats to head out together, several miles off the coast, to a spot in Trincomalee Canyon where the seafloor drops off to a depth of more than six thousand feet. From there, we鈥檒l split up and look for whales. Should someone on either boat spot any, he鈥檒l use a mobile phone to alert the other boat. We鈥檒l then trail the whales, wait for them to slow down or stop, and then get in the water.

We pack up, squeeze in, and set off south toward the horizon, our rickety craft riding low in the water. Hours later, we're tweny miles off the coast, floating in a dead-calm sea. Still, no whales.

鈥淭here were just so many out here last year,鈥� Prinsloo says, who had travelled here last year and had a half-dozen whale encounters. She鈥檚 curled up in a sheet wet with seawater and sweat, leaning against Peter Marshall. Both of them are wearing T-shirts around their faces, so only the lenses of their sunglasses peep through. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 know,鈥� Prinsloo laments. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 know what happened.鈥�

Ghislain, the photographer who told us the unfortunate crocodile tale earlier in the week, wipes his sweaty palms against his T-shirt. He emits an exaggerated sigh, takes a sip of water, and turns to stare into the open ocean. A minute becomes an hour; an hour becomes two. I check my dive watch: the temperature gauge reads 106. Even my fingers are sunburned.

The notion of all of us trying to arrange a peaceful encounter with whales is bit ironic, given the way humankind has treated them for centuries.

According to legend, in 1712, an American ship captained by Christopher Hussey was hunting right whales off the southern coast of Nantucket Island when a gale suddenly blew the vessel dozens of miles south, beyond sight of land, to a barren stretch of deep water in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The crew struggled to regain control of ship and were readying the mast to tack back to shore when they noticed columns of mist shooting up at odd angles from the water鈥檚 surface. Then they heard heavy, heaving exhalations. They had floated into a pod of whales. Hussey ordered the men to draw lances and harpoons and stab the whale closest to the ship. They killed it, tied it to the side of the boat, fitted the mast, and sailed back to Nantucket, then dropped the whale鈥檚 body on a south-facing beach.

This was no right whale. Hussey knew that the mouths of right whales are filled with baleen, a hairlike substance used in filtering out krill and small fish. The whale he had just caught had enormous teeth, several inches long, and a single nostril on top of its head. The bones of its flippers looked eerily like those of a human hand. Hussey and his crew cut open the whale鈥檚 head, and hundreds of gallons of thick, straw-colored oil oozed out. The oil must be sperm, they thought (wrongly); this strange whale must be carrying its 鈥渟eed鈥� within its oversize head. Hussey named it spermaceti (Greek sperma, 鈥渟eed鈥�; Latin cetus, 鈥渨hale鈥�). The English version of the name took hold: sperm whale.

From that point forward, the sperm whale was screwed.

By the mid-1700s, whale ships had flocked to Nantucket to join a thriving industry. Sperm whale oil, the straw-colored seed taken from the whale鈥檚 head, turned out to be an efficient and clean-burning fuel for everything from streetlamps to lighthouses. In its congealed form, it made top-quality candles, cosmetics, machine lubricants, and waterproofing agents. The Revolutionary War was fueled by sperm whale oil.

By the 1830s, more than 350 ships and 10,000 sailors were hunting sperm whales. Twenty years later, those numbers would double. Nantucket was processing more than five thousand sperm whale corpses a year and reaping upwards of twelve million gallons of oil. (A single whale could yield five hundred or more gallons of spermaceti; oil from boiled blubber could produce about twice that amount.)

But hunting the world鈥檚 largest predator didn鈥檛 come without dangers.

Whalers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were attacked regularly. The most famous incident occurred in 1820. The Nantucket whale ship Essex was off the coast of South America, its crew hunting whales, when they were rammed twice by a charging bull. The ship was lost. A crew of twenty men escaped in smaller boats and drifted off into the open ocean.

Nine weeks later, still drifting, the crew was close to starvation. Following maritime custom, the men drew lots to see who would be eaten. The captain鈥檚 cousin, a seventeen-year-old named Owen Coffin, was chosen. Coffin put his head on the side of the boat; another man pulled the trigger of a gun. 鈥淗e was soon dispatched,鈥� wrote the captain, 鈥渁nd nothing of him left.鈥�

Ninety-five days later, the boat was rescued. There were two survivors: the captain and the man who had pulled the trigger. The harrowing tale served as the basis for Herman Melville鈥檚 novel Moby-Dick and, more recently, Nathaniel Philbrick鈥檚 nonfiction bestseller In the Heart of the Sea.

As sperm whale stocks decreased in the ocean near Nantucket, and whalers had to search farther away, the cost of oil increased. Meanwhile, a Canadian geologist named Abraham Gesner invented a method of distilling kerosene from petroleum. This process produced a substance close to whale oil in quality, but much cheaper. In the 1860s, the whale-oil industry collapsed.

The discovery of petroleum sounds like a death knell for whaling, but ultimately, this new cheap fuel would hasten the sperm whale鈥檚 destruction.

In the 1920s, new diesel-powered ships could process whale bodies so quickly and easily that whaling become profitable again. Sperm whale oil became a primary ingredient in brake fluid, glue, and lubricants. It was used to make soap, margarine, and lipstick and other cosmetics. The whale鈥檚 muscles and guts were mashed up and processed into pet food and tennis-racket strings. (If you own a top-quality wooden tennis racket made between 1950 and 1970, chances are it was strung with the sinew of sperm whales.)

Whaling went global. From the 1930s to 1980s, Japan alone killed 260,000 sperm whales鈥攁bout 20 percent of the total population.

By the early 1970s, an estimated 60 percent of the ocean鈥檚 sperm whale population had been hunted, and the species was nearing extinction. While the world had grown proficient at hunting sperm whales, the whales themselves were a complete mystery. No one knew how they communicated or socialized; no one even knew what they ate. They had never been filmed underwater.

The documentary Whales Weep Not, which was seen by millions of people in the 1980s, offered the public the first view of sperm whales in their natural habitat. Sperm whales seemed far from the image handed down by history and literature. They were not surly brutes munching boats and men but gentle, friendly, even welcoming. The global antiwhaling movement gained support throughout the early 1980s and eventually ended all commercial whaling by 1986.

The general increase in awareness of the sperm whale鈥檚 intelligence and human-like behavior has not deterred some countries from trying to hunt them again. As of 2010, Japan, Iceland, and Norway have been to end its thirty-year moratorium on whaling. Schn枚ller and other researchers predict the moratorium could be lifted as soon as 2016, and hunting of sperm whales could again become legal.

Sperm whales have the lowest reproductive rate of any mammal; females give birth to a single calf once every four to six years. The current sperm whale population is estimated at about 360,000, down from approximately 1.2 million just two hundred years ago, where it probably hovered for tens of thousands of years before whaling began. Nobody knows for sure, but many researchers fear the population has been declining once more. Continued hunting could significantly decrease the population for generations and eventually push sperm whales back toward extinction.

Back on the boat, another hour passes. And another. I check the thermometer on my dive watch and notice the temperature has climbed to 109.

Then, suddenly, an electronic chirp blasts from the back of the boat. It鈥檚 Schn枚ller, calling our captain鈥檚 cell phone. The DareWin team has just spotted a pod of sperm whales near the Trincomalee harbor. Schn枚ller says the whales have probably been there the whole time; we just hadn鈥檛 been far enough out to spot them. They鈥檙e following slowly behind the pod, waiting for an opportunity to get in.

The captain starts the motor and we shoot south.

鈥淵ou see the ploofs?鈥� says Prinsloo, pointing east at the horizon. What look like little mushroom clouds shoot from the surface at a 45-degree angle. A sperm whale has only one external nostril, which is located on the left side of its head and causes its exhales to emerge at an angle. These distinctive blows can go about twelve feet high, and on a windless and clear day, they鈥檙e visible for a mile or more.

鈥淭hey look like dandelions, don鈥檛 they!鈥� says Prinsloo. Three hundred yards to our right, another blow erupts.

鈥淕et your mask,鈥� she says.

Our team has agreed to put only two people in the water at any one time, to avoid scaring off the whales. I鈥檓 on the first shift. The captain turns and pulls parallel to the pod so that we鈥檙e a few hundred feet in front of them.

鈥淵ou can never chase down a whale,鈥� Prinsloo explains as she yanks off the sheet and grabs her fins. 鈥淭hey always need to choose to come to you.鈥� If we move slowly in predictable motions, just in front of the whales鈥� path, they can easily echolocate the boat and get comfortable with our presence. If they鈥檙e disturbed by us, they鈥檒l take a deep breath and disappear beneath the surface. We鈥檒l never see them again.

As the boat edges closer, the whales still haven鈥檛 dived鈥攁 good sign. Prinsloo says it鈥檚 not a full pod, just a mother and calf. Another good sign. Calves get curious around freedivers, and their mothers, in Prinsloo鈥檚 experience, encourage them to investigate.

Both whales are four hundred feet from the boat when they slow down, almost to a stop. Our captain cuts the motor. Prinsloo nods to me; I pull on my fins, mask, and snorkel, and we quietly submerge.

鈥淭ake my hand,鈥� she says. 鈥淣ow, follow.鈥� Breathing through our snorkels with our faces just below the surface, we kick out toward the whales. Today, the visibility is mediocre, about a hundred feet. We can鈥檛 see the whales in the water, but we can certainly hear them. The blows grow louder and louder. Then the clicking begins; it sounds like a playing card stuck in the moving spokes of a bicycle. The water starts vibrating.

Prinsloo tugs my arm, trying to get me to hurry up. She pops her head above the surface for a moment and stops. I stick my head up and see a mound a hundred feet in front of us, like a black sun sinking on the horizon. The clicking grows louder. The mound pops up from the surface again, then disappears. The whales leave; we don鈥檛 see them depart. But we can hear them beneath the water, their blows softening as they drift off. The waters calm, the clicks slow like a clock winding down. And they鈥檙e gone.

Prinsloo lifts her head and faces me. 鈥淲hale,鈥� she says. I nod, smiling, take the snorkel out of my mouth, and begin to tell her how incredible the experience was. Then she shakes her head and points behind me.

鈥淣o. Whale.鈥�

The mother and calf have returned. They鈥檙e stopped and are facing us in the other direction, a hundred and fifty feet away. The clicking starts again. It鈥檚 louder than it was before. I instinctively kick toward the whales, but Prinsloo grabs my hand.

鈥淒on鈥檛 swim, don鈥檛 move,鈥� she whispers. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e watching us.鈥�

The clicks now sound like jackhammers on pavement. These are echolocation clicks; the whales are scanning us inside and out. We watch from the surface as they exhale. With a kick of their flukes, they lunge toward us.

鈥淟isten,鈥� Prinsloo says urgently. She grabs me by the shoulder and looks directly at me. 鈥淵ou need to set the right intention now. They can sense your intent.鈥� I know how dangerous human-whale interactions can be, but I strive to set my fear aside, calm myself, and think good thoughts.

Behind Prinsloo, the whales approach, hissing and blowing steam like two locomotives. 鈥淭rust this moment,鈥� she says. The whales are a hundred feet, seventy-five feet away. Prinsloo grips my hand. 鈥淭rust this moment,鈥� she repeats, and she pulls me a few feet beneath the surface.

A hazy black mass materializes in the distance, growing larger and darker, like a drop of ink on a paper towel. Details emerge. A fin. A gaping mouth. A patch of white. An eye, sunk low on a knotted head, peers in our direction. The mother is the size of a school bus; her calf, a short bus. They look like landmasses, submerged islands. Prinsloo squeezes my hand and I squeeze back.

The whales approach us head-on. Then, thirty feet from colliding with us, pull softly to the side and languorously veer left. The rhythm of the clicks shifts; the water fills with what sounds to me like coda clicks. I believe they are identifying themselves to us. The calf floats just in front of its mother, bobs its head slightly, and stares with an unblinking eye. Its mouth is turned up at the end, like it鈥檚 smiling. The mother wears the same expression; all sperm whales do.

They keep their gaze upon us as they pass within a dozen feet of our faces, shower us with clicks, then retreat slowly back into the shadows. The coda clicks turn to echolocation clicks, then the echolocation fades, and the ocean, once again, falls silent.

Trying to save and study sperm whales is not without dangers either.

One of my companions tells me about a freediver-whale encounter in the Azores, off the west coast of Africa. After more than an hour of friendly contact and observation, a young bull approached and apparently got jealous. The bull turned and shot the freediver with clicks that left the man with hours of debilitating pain in his stomach and chest. (Long term, he suffered no ill effects.)

Schn枚ller told me a similar story. He was diving with sperm whales in 2011 when a curious calf approached and started bumping him with its nose. Schn枚ller held out his hand to push the calf back and felt a sudden shock of heat rush up his arm. The energy from the clicks coming out of the calf鈥檚 nose was strong enough to paralyze Schn枚ller鈥檚 hand for the next few hours. He too recovered.

Prinsloo and Ghislain had their share of close calls in Trincomalee last year. After spending hours in the water with a pod, a bull approached Ghislain at a fast clip. Prinsloo motioned to Ghislain to get out of the way. Just then, the bull turned, raised his twelve-foot fluke above the surface, spun it, and slapped it down. If Ghislain hadn鈥檛 moved, his head would have been crushed. Prinsloo and Ghislain claimed the fluke slap was possibly a playful interaction, not meant to harm. But when you鈥檙e in the water with an animal five hundred times your weight and ten times your size, such play can be fatal.

The fact is that nobody鈥攏ot Prinsloo, Schn枚ller, or Buyle鈥攔eally knows how risky these kinds of encounters are. Up until ten years ago, Schn枚ller told me earlier, nobody was diving with whales.

鈥淓veryone thought it was too dangerous,鈥� said Schn枚ller. Today, only a handful of divers attempt it, and most have had their share of narrow escapes.

Few people 鈥� and no other researchers 鈥� would dare risk their careers 鈥� and lives 鈥� to dive with these animals.

Luke Rendell, a sperm whale researcher at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, told me in an e-mail that Schn枚ller鈥檚 research approach looked like 鈥渁 pile of hokum鈥� and was probably a 鈥減retty flimsy scientific cover to go swimming with whales.鈥� His team was perfectly capable of 鈥渃ollecting data without freediving with the animals, thank you.鈥� To be fair, Rendell said he welcomed more researchers to the field, but he thought the looked suspiciously like pseudoscience.

Schn枚ller brushes off the criticism as 鈥渘ormal scientist reaction.鈥� And he鈥檚 finding legitimacy with partnerships with researchers at the University of Paris and other oceanographic institutions. 鈥淭his will all be official, it will all be scientific,鈥� he says.

Institutional scientists study sperm whale communication by recording clicks with a hydrophone from the deck of the boat, without ever knowing which whale is clicking and why. One of the longest-running sperm whale research programs is the , headed by Hal Whitehead. The group studies sperm whale behavior by, among other things, following pods around and snapping photographs of flukes when the whales come up for air.

Meanwhile, last year Schn枚ller had a face-to-face encounter with five sperm whales that lasted three hours. The entire dive was documented in three-dimensional video and high-definition audio and is, to date, the longest and most detailed footage of sperm whales ever recorded.

Schn枚ller insists he鈥檚 not trying to subvert the scientific system鈥攈e wants to work within it鈥攈e is simply trying to speed up the collection of data, which, at the institutional level, happens at a glacial pace. For Schn枚ller, and perhaps for the whales, that pace may be too slow.

If hunters don鈥檛 eradicate sperm whales, pollution might. Since the 1920s, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), carcinogenic chemicals used in the manufacture of electronics, have slowly seeped into the world鈥檚 oceans and, in some areas, reached toxic levels. For an animal to be processed as food, it must contain less than 2 parts per million of PCBs. Any animals that contains 50 ppm of PCBs must, by law, be considered toxic waste and be disposed of in an appropriate facility.

Dr. Roger Payne, an ocean conservationist, analyzed sea life for PCBs and found that orcas had about 400 parts per million of PCBs鈥攅ight times the toxic limit. He found beluga whales with 3,200 ppm of PCBs, and bottle-nosed dolphins with 6,800 ppm. All of these animals were, according to Payne, 鈥渕obile Superfund sites.鈥� Nobody knows how much more pollution (PCBs, mercury, and other chemicals) whales and other oceanic animals can absorb before they start dying off en masse.

Payne and other researchers point to the baiji dolphin, a freshwater native of China鈥檚 Yangtze River, as a possible portent of the sperm whale鈥檚 fate. Considered one of the most intelligent of all dolphin species, the baiji dolphin has become functionally extinct due to pollution and other manmade disturbances. (At last count, there were about three baiji dolphins left.)

For Schn枚ller, sperm whale research isn't recreation; he doesn't spend months away from his family, using his own money, just to go 鈥渟wimming with whales.鈥� He's in a race to understand these animals before humans wipe them off from the face of the Earth.

On the fourth day, the film crew leaves. The cameraman had been violently seasick since the first day and refused to spend another ten hours motoring around in a rickety boat. The director, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, was exhausted.

鈥淵ou never told me it would be this hard,鈥� said Vaughan-Lee when I鈥檇 talked with him the previous night. He was scratching his bald, sunburned knees beside the patio table. I had warned him, repeatedly, but the point was moot. He told me he鈥檇 decided to cut his losses and take the next flight home to San Francisco.

They left a day too soon.

That morning, the remaining team of seven, plus the hired boat hands, cram into a single boat designed for half our number. With the motor coughing and wheezing, we head south. Hours later, we鈥檙e fifteen miles from the coast and idling over the deep water of Trincomalee Canyon again. Schn枚ller checks his GPS, putting us near where they saw the whales yesterday.

鈥淭urn the motor off. I listen for them,鈥� he says. From the bow of the boat, he grabs a sawed-off broomstick with a metal pasta strainer tied to the end. He inserts a small hydrophone into the center of the strainer and drops the whole contraption into the water, then puts on a pair of ratty headphones.

This strange device, which is wired to an amplifier, works like an antenna to home in on sperm whale clicks. By spinning the strainer around, Schn枚ller can determine what direction they鈥檙e coming from. Frequency and volume give him an idea of how deep the whales might be.

鈥淭hey sell these to institutions for fifteen hundred euro,鈥� he says, laughing. 鈥淚 make mine from junk, and it works just as good.鈥� Click Research, a new oceanographic manufacturing company he鈥檚 now building, will offer a version that works as well as the institutional model for only $350.

Schn枚ller puts the headphones over my head and hands me the broomstick. 鈥淲hat do you hear?鈥� he asks. I tell him I hear static. Schn枚ller cups the headphones tightly over my ears. 鈥淣ow listen. What do you hear?鈥�

He takes the broomstick from my hands and spins the strainer slowly around below the surface. Through the static, I begin to hear a syncopated rhythm, like distant tribal drums. I tell Schn枚ller to stop moving the strainer. Everyone on the boat falls silent. The rhythm speeds up and grows higher in pitch, the patterns overlapping. What I鈥檓 hearing isn鈥檛 drums, of course, but the echolocation clicks of sperm whales hunting in the deep-water canyon miles beneath our boat.

Schn枚ller grabs the headphones and passes them around the boat. Everyone is entranced. A boat hand listens for a moment, then passes the headphones back to Schn枚ller. He gingerly walks to the bow and picks up a worn, wooden oar, then dips the paddle in the water and sticks the end of the handle in his ear.

He explains in stilted English that this was how Sri Lankan fishermen used to listen for whales hundreds of years ago. Sperm whale echolocation, even from miles beneath the ocean鈥檚 surface, is strong enough to vibrate five feet of wood and make an audible clicking sound. I give it a try and hear a faint tick-tick-tick. It sounds like a signal from another world, which, in a way, is precisely what it is. I get chills listening to it.

Schn枚ller puts the headphones on and spins the strainer dexterously. He tells us the whales will switch from making echolocation clicks to codas as they ascend. By listening to these subtle shifts in click patterns, and the volume and clarity of the clicks, he has taught himself to predict the location and moment that the whales will surface, with startling accuracy. I ask him: How accurate? Then he demonstrates.

鈥淭hey are two kilometers that way,鈥� he says, pointing west. 鈥淭hey are coming up. They will be here in two minutes.鈥� We sit, staring westward. 鈥淭hirty seconds…鈥� he says. 鈥淭hey are moving to the east, and… right…鈥�

Exactly on cue, a pod of five whales surfaces about fifteen hundred feet from our boat, each exhaling a magnificent blow. He grins, obviously proud of himself, takes off the headphones, and throws the strainer and broomstick in the bow. I give him a high-five. The boat captain looks dumbfounded.

鈥淥kay, now,鈥� says Schn枚ller. 鈥淲ho wants to go in?鈥�

After dinner, Schn枚ller, Gazzo, and Ghislain are sitting around the patio table going over the day鈥檚 footage. The clips are hypnotizing. Each of us had short encounters with half a dozen different whales. Schn枚ller and Gazzo recorded the interactions in 3-D high-definition video. He says this is the first time some of these behaviors have been documented at such at close range. The most impressive footage, he says, comes from the dive that Guy Gazzo and I took at the beginning of the day.

A pod of about five whales turned and approached our boat. Schn枚ller told me to grab my mask and follow Gazzo, who was carrying the 3-D camera, into the water. At first the whales were moving away from the boat, but as we swam out farther they changed direction to meet us face to face. Some two hundred feet in front of us, a shadow expanded, then separated into two forms鈥攖wo enormous whales, perhaps thirty-five feet long. One whale, a bull, came directly at us but then unexpectedly spun around so that its belly was facing us. We couldn鈥檛 see its eyes or the top of its head. As it approached, it dove just beneath our fins and let out a rapid burst of coda clicks so powerful that I could feel them in my chest and skull. The bull, still upside down, released a plume of black feces, like a smoke screen, and disappeared. The entire encounter lasted less than thirty seconds.

Schn枚ller boots up the video on his laptop and plays it back for me. This time, he turns up the volume on his laptop speakers.

鈥淵ou hear that?鈥� he says, then reverses the video again, and again. I listen closely. The clicks sound harsh and violent, like machine-gun fire. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 not a coda.鈥� Schn枚ller laughs. He plays the clicks back again. 鈥淎nd he鈥檚 not talking to you.鈥�

What Gazzo and I heard and felt was a creak鈥攖he echolocation click train that sperm whales use when they鈥檙e homing in on prey. The whale flipped on its back so it could process the echolocation clicks more easily in its upper jaw, much as a human might cock his head to focus on a sound. Schn枚ller plays the video again and again, laughing.

鈥淗e was looking at you to see if he could eat you!鈥� he says. 鈥淟ucky for you, I guess you didn鈥檛 look too delicious.鈥�

But this brings up a question I鈥檝e had ever since we first boarded the boats. Why didn鈥檛 they eat us? We鈥檙e certainly easy prey.

Schn枚ller believes that, when the whales echolocate our bodies, they perceive that we have hair, big lungs, a large brain鈥攁 combination of characteristics they don鈥檛 see in the ocean. Perhaps they recognize that we鈥檙e fellow mammals, that we have the potential for intelligence. If this theory is correct, then sperm whales are smarter than us in one crucial way: they see the similarities between our two species more readily than we do.

He then brings up another file on his computer, a ten-second audio loop he recorded with the hydrophones earlier in the day. He clicks Play.

鈥淲ell?鈥� He looks at me. I tell him the only thing I hear is distant echolocation clicks, which sound like random emanations from a drum machine. He orders me to put on his headphones, turns up the volume, and blasts me with what sounds like an enormous bomb exploding from miles away.

鈥淚 think this is something big,鈥� he says. I ask him if the hydrophone just bumped into the side of the boat. 鈥淣o, impossible,鈥� he says. 鈥淭his is something important. I promise you, this is big.鈥�

Excerpted from James Nestor's听 (An Eamon Dolan Book/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Available Tuesday, June 24, 2014.

On June 23, 2014, Schn枚ller took his sperm whale research public. He launched a crowd-funding campaign, called , to raise funds for four sperm whale research expeditions over the next year. High-level contributors to the campaign will be able to join the expeditions at research points around the globe鈥擮man, Sri Lanka, Guadaloupe, and more鈥攁nd swim face-to-face with sperm whales as Schn枚ller and his crew document the encounters. All proceeds go to sperm whale research, specifically, to cracking the cetacean language code.

The post The Freedivers Who Eavesdrop on Whales appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Excerpted from , by James Nestor. The full ebook single is available from .

Half-Safe.

THEY HAD SPENT 14 days in darkness.

Late on the morning of the 15th day, December 2, 1950, light finally peeked through a crack in the curtain that hung over the passenger-side window. Ben lifted the curtain and looked outside. The sky was blue, and the sun, as big as a dinner plate, shone brightly. The storm clouds had retreated to the horizon. Ben took a dirty tissue from his shirt pocket, swabbed his eyes, and lifted himself from behind the steering wheel.

It had been four full months since Ben and his wife, Elinore, steered the tiny amphibious jeep they called Half-Safe into the frigid waters of Halifax Harbor and headed east toward Africa. It was the first time anyone had tried to circumnavigate the world by land and sea in a single vehicle, let alone one that was eight times smaller than any motorized boat that had ever crossed the Atlantic. It was a harebrained scheme, and the Carlins knew it. That was the point.

国产吃瓜黑料 for its own sake had first attracted Ben, an engineer from rural Western Australia, to Elinore, an American Red Cross nurse, when the two met in India at the end of World War II. And there could be no more outlandish adventure than an attempt to 鈥渄rive鈥� across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans鈥攁nd actually drive across the continents in between鈥攊n an automobile. Especially this automobile鈥攁 converted 1942 GPW (General Purpose Willys) amphibious jeep built by Ford for the U.S. Army. It looked like a cross between a 4×4 and a rowboat, with a stubby pointed front, a square rear end, and a five-by-10 steel box on top. It was half car, half boat, and entirely ridiculous. The GPW amphibious jeeps were designed to putter through shallow streams for a few minutes at a time and usually failed even at that; they had proved so useless in the field that the Army canceled production. They were never intended to be used on the ocean.

Helpless and lost in the middle of 41 million square miles of open water, Ben and Elinore realized that their comic little adventure was quickly becoming a suicide mission. Both were in their thirties, but looked as though they had aged decades in just a few weeks. Elinore, famished and vomiting anchovies into a tin mug, had gone from voluptuous to skeletal. Ben looked worse. His skin was pale, a delta of stress lines spread across his forehead, and his eyes were baggy and bloodshot. His face was caked with exhaust soot, engine grease, and sweat.

But now, weeks into their Atlantic crossing, the Carlins had no choice but to suck it up and keep following the compass east, toward the coast of the Spanish colony of Western Sahara, toward solid ground and safety.

Ben squinted out Half-Safe鈥檚 back hatch and looked at the deck. The jeep was sitting dangerously low in the water. Waves washed over the windshield and side windows, threatening to swamp the cabin. The cloth sea anchor, designed to drag in the water to stabilize the vehicle, floated behind Half-Safe in tatters, shredded by the storm.

I FIRST HEARD ABOUT Carlin and Half-Safe about a decade ago, after my own, less extraordinary misadventure at sea. I was sailing the Golden Gate, the strait spanned by the famous bridge, outside San Francisco with an old friend named Steve, a novice sailor who had just bought a 36-foot boat. We were barely out of the harbor before it became obvious that neither of us knew what we were doing. Then the motor broke. Soon we were drifting slowly west, toward the open ocean.

It was my first real taste of being adrift at sea, lost. For six hours, Steve and I felt alternately terrified and oddly bored. By nightfall, Steve had given up and called emergency rescue. As we waited to be towed back into the harbor, he told me about a guy named Ben Carlin who spent years in this kind of predicament鈥攜ears stuck in the five-by-10 cabin of a tricked-out military jeep that was somehow also a boat, trying to make it around the world.

When I got home, I went online and read what I could. The Ben Carlin story seemed too ridiculous to be true鈥攂ut if it was true, it was the most bizarre adventure tale I鈥檇 ever heard. Either way, I had to find out more. There wasn鈥檛 much to find, however: a one-line mention on a GeoCities page, a picture of the jeep on a site maintained by Army-vehicle enthusiasts. Carlin had written two books offering partial accounts of the journey, but they were both long out of print and difficult to track down.

Ten years after first hearing about Carlin, and still unable to piece his story together, I flew to Perth, Australia in November 2011. If there were answers to the Ben Carlin mystery they’d be at the Guildford Grammar School, his former alma matter, which houses nearly all of the surviving records of Carlin鈥檚 bizarre around-the-world quest. A few days after arriving at Guildford, Carlin’s life and his adventure began to unravel in ways more strange, tragic, and extraordinary than I had ever expected. Soon, I was no longer just exhuming Ben Carlin鈥檚 story after 60 years, but in an odd way becoming a part of it.

BY THE MORNING OF December 2, 1950,听 the rain returned, followed by wind and waves. By afternoon, the swells had risen to 30, 40, even 50 feet. The jeep was flung stories-high over the crests of the waves and down the other side so violently that Ben and Elinore were shot from their seats into mid-air. 听The tank carrying most of Half-Safe’s fuel broke loose from the hull; Ben watched as it bobbed in the spindrift and then disappeared into the darkness. He had no other option but to gun the engine and try to run before the storm. This was no ordinary storm. It was a full-on hurricane鈥攁nd the Carlins were in the middle of it.

By evening the swells had gotten bigger. They slammed into the jeep with such deafening force Ben knew it was only a matter of time before the roof collapsed, the cabin flooded, and the jeep sank. Ben turned to Elinore and made her scream the escape procedure in his ear.

鈥淵ou shout, 鈥极耻迟,鈥欌赌� she yelled, her voice straining above the din of the rain and wind beating on the steel walls of the cabin. 鈥淚 get out and wait. You follow and grab the gear. I follow you. Keep in contact!鈥�

Another wave hit.Ben pulled the lighter from his shirt pocket and lit a cigarette. Elinore watched the cherry dance in the darkness, wondering which of the waves detonating against Half-Safe鈥檚 windshield would be the one to finally burst in. Through the passenger-side curtain, she and Ben watched the sky darken. They felt a swell below their feet inflate like a giant lung and crash down the other side. Ben tumbled, his cigarette arcing across the dashboard like a rescue flare shot into a moonless night. The window went black. Half-Safe climbed another wave.

The post History’s Most Insane Around-the-World 国产吃瓜黑料 appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

During my week at the World Freediving Championships, divers kept telling me I should start training and try it myself someday. So I did start鈥攚ith an out-of-the-water session on breath-holding鈥攁nd听it blew my mind. It also hurt. Like hell.听

My teacher was , a South African freediving instructor and yoga teacher who gave me a private, two-hour lesson designed to increase my personal breath-hold best to somewhere north of 60 seconds. We met at a covered patio overlooking Messinian Bay, laid out yoga mats, and started off with some rib-expanding stretches. Prinsloo explained that, through yoga and breathing exercises, freedivers develop up to 85 percent more lung capacity than the average person. Freediver , who in听2009听set the world breath-hold record of 11 minutes, 35 seconds, boasts a 10.5-liter lung capacity, versus six liters for an average adult male.听

But bigger lungs are only part of it. What does the rest is our听鈥渕ammalian diving reflexes,鈥� a series of听automatic physiological triggers that kick in the second we enter the water. The moment we submerge, our heartrate automatically slows down 25 percent, decreasing our need for oxygen and allowing us to hold our breath longer. As we dive deeper, past 100 feet, the capillaries in our legs and hands close off to save blood for more important areas like the heart and brain. At extremely deep dives (around 300 feet), a 鈥渂lood shift鈥� occurs, in which the walls of our organs, working like pressure-release valves, magically begin to allow the free flow of blood plasma and water from surrounding circulatory walls into the organs themselves. Without this shift, the organs would be crushed by the incredible water pressure. As we ascend, the reflexes reverse. By the surface, we become land mammals again.

鈥淭he water is where we came from,鈥� said Prinsloo, transitioning me into yet another downward dog. 鈥淎ll freedivers are doing is relearning what our bodies already know. You are born to do this!鈥�

That is, so long as I can take the convulsions. The human body is programmed with a three-stage defense system that helps freedivers gauge how much more they can take. Stage one is marked by convulsions, caused by the buildup of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream. Then the spleen kicks in, delivering fresh, oxygen-rich blood so fast that you can feel it. The last line of defense is the blackout, which occurs when the brain, sensing that there鈥檚 no longer enough oxygen to support itself, shuts off to conserve energy for other organs. This triggers the larynx to close up, sealing the throat and inhibiting water from entering the lungs. In the blacked-out state, the human body can survive up to 10 minutes underwater without permanent damage.

At the end of the lesson, I leaned back on my yoga mat for a breath-hold attempt. Big inhale. Prinsloo started the stopwatch, and I closed my eyes. After a while, I felt my body convulse, my stomach wriggling as if an alien baby was punching its way out. I felt horrible and claustrophobic. I imagined what it must be like to have these sensations 200 feet below the surface. The thought freaked me out even more. Some time later, it felt like a wet blanket had been thrown over me鈥攖he spleen doing its thing, I gathered. Then the darkness behind my closed eyes got somehow darker, ambient noise of the pool area faded, and I started drifting off to sleep.

鈥淏reathe!鈥� said Prinsloo. I came to and gasped for air. I was dizzy, having trouble focusing through fluttering eyes, but I felt good. Prinsloo smiled, nodded, and showed me the stopwatch. Surprise: I just held my breath for three minutes, ten seconds.

The post Learning to Freedive appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

You鈥檙e about to read one of the 国产吃瓜黑料 Classics, a series highlighting the best stories we鈥檝e ever published, along with author interviews, where-are-they-now updates, and other exclusive bonus materials. Get access to all of the 国产吃瓜黑料 Classics when you sign up for 国产吃瓜黑料+.

Junko Kitahama’s face is pale blue, her mouth agape, her head craned back like a dead bird鈥檚. Through her swim mask, her eyes are wide and unblinking, staring at the sun. She isn鈥檛 breathing.

鈥淏low on her face!鈥� yells a man swimming next to her. Another man grabs her head from behind and pushes her chin out of the water. 鈥淏reathe!鈥� he yells. Someone from the deck of a boat yells for oxygen. 鈥淏reathe!鈥� the man repeats. But Kitahama, who just surfaced from a breath-hold dive 180 feet below the surface of the ocean, doesn鈥檛 breathe. She doesn鈥檛 move. Kitahama looks dead.

Moments later, she coughs, jerks, twitches her shoulders, flutters her lips. Her face softens as she comes to. 鈥淚 was swimming and鈥︹�� She laughs and continues. 鈥淭hen I just started dreaming!鈥� Two men slowly float her over to an oxygen tank sitting on a raft. While she recovers behind a surgical mask, another freediver takes her place and prepares to plunge even deeper.

Kitahama, a female competitor from Japan, is one of more than 130 freedivers from 31 countries who have gathered here鈥攐ne mile off the coast of Kalamata, Greece, in the deep, mouthwash blue waters of Messinian Bay鈥攆or the , the largest competition ever held for the sport. Over the next week, in an event organized by the (AIDA), they鈥檒l test themselves and each other to see who can swim the deepest on a single lungful of air without passing out, losing muscle control, or drowning. The winners get a medal.

How deep can they go? Nobody knows. Competitive is a relatively new sport, and since the first world championships were held in 1996, records have been broken every year, sometimes every few months. Fifty years ago, scientists believed that the deepest a human could freedive was about 160 feet. Recently, freedivers have routinely doubled and tripled that mark. In 2007, , a 41-year-old Austrian, dove more than 700 feet鈥攁ssisted by a watersled on the way down and an air bladder to pull him to the surface鈥攖o claim a new world record for absolute depth. Nitsch, who didn鈥檛 compete in Greece, , deeper than two football fields are long.

Nobody has ever drowned at an organized freediving event, but enough people have died outside of competition that freediving ranks as the second-most-dangerous adventure sport, right after BASE jumping. The statistics are a bit murky: some deaths go unreported, and the numbers that are kept include people who freedive as part of other activities, like spearfishing. But one estimate of worldwide freediving-related fatalities revealed a nearly threefold increase, from 21 deaths in 2005 to 60 in 2008.

Only a few of these fatalities have been widely publicized. The famed French freediver Audrey Mestre鈥攚ife of freediving pioneer Francisco 鈥淧ipin鈥� Ferreras鈥� to 561 feet, leading to controversy that continues still about whether Ferreras, who managed safety for the attempt, did his job properly. More recently, just three months before the 2011 world championships, Adel Abu Haliqa, a 40-year-old founding member of a freediving club in the United Arab Emirates, drowned in Santorini, Greece, during a 230-foot attempt. A month later, Patrick Musimu, a former world-record holder from Belgium, in a pool in Brussels.

Competitive freedivers blame such deaths on carelessness, arguing that each dead diver was going it alone or relying on machines to assist the dives鈥攂oth very high-risk pursuits. 鈥淐ompetitive freediving is a safe sport. It鈥檚 all very regulated, very controlled,鈥� says , a 31-year-old world-record freediver from New Zealand. 鈥淚 would never do it if it wasn鈥檛.鈥� He points out that, during some 39,000 competition freedives over the past 12 years, there has never been a fatality.

Through events like the world championships, Trubridge and others hope to change freediving鈥檚 shaky image and bring it closer to the mainstream. City officials in Kalamata, a freediving hub, are trying to help. To that end, they hosted an opening ceremony for the event on a Saturday night along a crowded boardwalk. There, hundreds of competitors, coaches, and crew members in matching T-shirts and tracksuits waved national flags and screamed their countries鈥� anthems from an enormous stage鈥攁 scene that looked like a low-rent Olympics. Behind them, a 40-piece marching band played a ragged version of the Rocky theme as grainy video highlights from past freedives were projected onto a 30-foot screen.

鈥淵ou ask me, this all looks crazy,鈥� said Xaris Vgenis, a Kalamatan who runs a watersports shop near the beach. A video of a 300-foot dive appeared on the screen, and Vgenis shook his head. 鈥淵ou鈥檒l never get me to do it!鈥�

Then the lights of the stage darkened, the video screen dimmed, and the PA system went silent. Moments later, strobe lights flashed and streams of fireworks exploded in the night sky. The participants cheered while a few hundred locals scratched their heads. The 2011 freediving world championships were on.

Two days after the opening ceremony, on a windless and hot Monday morning, I head for the Kalamata Marina, where a scruffy Quebecois expat named Yanis Georgoulis is waiting on a 27-foot boat to carry me to the first event. For all its mainstream hopes, freediving has a built-in problem: it鈥檚 almost impossible to watch. The playing field is underwater, there are no video feeds beamed back to land, and it鈥檚 a logistical challenge even to get near the action. Today鈥檚 staging area is a sketchy-looking 20-by-20-foot flotilla of boats, platforms, and gear that looks like it was swiped from the set of Waterworld.

While we motor out in the shadow of toothy coastal mountains, I use the time to brush up on . The competition officially starts the night before a dive, when divers secretly submit the proposed depths of the next day鈥檚 dive attempts to a panel of judges. It鈥檚 basically a bid, and there鈥檚 gamesmanship involved as each diver tries to guess what the other divers will do. 鈥淚t鈥檚 like playing poker,鈥� Trubridge told me. 鈥淵ou are playing the other divers as much as you are playing yourself.鈥� The hope is that your foes will choose a shallower dive than you can do, or that they鈥檒l choose a deeper dive than they can do and end up 鈥渂usting.鈥�

In freediving, you bust either by flubbing one of dozens of technical requirements during and after the dive or by blacking out before you reach the surface, grounds for immediate disqualification. While not common in competitions (I鈥檓 told), blackouts happen often enough that layers of safety precautions are put in place, including rescue divers who monitor each dive, sonar tracking from the flotilla, and a lanyard guide attached to divers鈥� ankles that keeps them from drifting off course鈥攁 potentially fatal hazard, I鈥檒l later learn.

A few minutes before each dive, a metal plate covered in white Velcro is attached to a rope and sunk to the depth the competitor submitted the night before. An official counts down, and the diver submerges and follows the rope to the plate, grabs any of dozens of tags affixed to it, and follows the rope back to the surface. About 60 feet down or lower, the competitor is met by rescue divers who are there to assist in the event of a blackout. If he passes out so deep that the safety divers can鈥檛 see him, that will be detected by the sonar. The rope will then be hoisted up and the diver鈥檚 unconscious body dragged to the surface, rag-doll style.

Divers who successfully resurface are put through a battery of tests known as the surface protocol. This gauges their coherence and motor skills by requiring them, among other things, to remove their face masks, quickly flash a sign to a judge, and say 鈥淚鈥檓 OK.鈥� If you pass, you get a white card, validating the dive.

鈥淭he rules are there to make freediving safe, measurable, and comparable,鈥� says CarlaSue Hanson, the media spokesperson for AIDA. 鈥淭hey are set up to ensure that, through the whole dive, the diver is in full control. That鈥檚 what competitive freediving is all about: control.鈥� As long as you鈥檙e in control, it鈥檚 all right if (as sometimes happens) blood vessels burst in your nose and you come out looking like Sissy Spacek in Carrie. 鈥淭he judges don鈥檛 care how someone looks,鈥� Hanson says. 鈥淏lood? That鈥檚 nothing. As far as the rules go, blood is OK.鈥�

After an hour, Georgoulis ties up to the flotilla. In the distance, a motorboat cuts a white line from the shore to deliver the first competitors to the site. There are no fans present. Only officials, divers, coaches, and a handful of staff are allowed out here, a group numbering about 15 today.

The divers show up wearing hooded wetsuits and insectoid goggles, each moving with syrupy-slow steps as they warm up on the sailboat, staring with wide, lucid eyes lost in meditation. One, two, three鈥攖hey slide like otters into the sea, then lie back, looking semi-comatose as their coaches slowly float them over to one of three lines dangling from the flotilla. A judge issues a one-minute warning, and then the competition begins.

Freediving is broken down into : today鈥檚 is called constant weight no fins, abbreviated as CNF. In CNF, divers go down using their lungs, bodies, and an optional weight that, if used, must be brought back to the surface. Of the six areas in competitive freediving鈥攚hich include everything from depth disciplines like free immersion (the diver can use the guide rope to propel himself up and down) to pool disciplines like static apnea (simple breath holding)鈥擟NF is considered the purest. Its reigning king is Trubridge, who broke the world record in December 2010 with a 331-foot dive. Today he鈥檚 trying for 305 feet, a conservative figure for him but the deepest attempt on the schedule. Before he arrives, a dozen other divers kick things off.

An official on line one counts down from ten, announces 鈥渙fficial top,鈥� and begins counting up: 鈥淥ne, two, three, four, five鈥︹�� The first diver, Wendy Timmermans of the Netherlands, has until 30 to go. She inhales a few last mouthfuls of air, ducks her head beneath the water, and descends. As her body sinks into the shadows of the Mediterranean, the monitoring official announces her depth every few seconds. Two minutes later, after reaching 171 feet, Timmermans emerges and passes the surface protocol, setting a new national record. Another diver goes down on line two; another preps on three.

The diver on three takes one last breath, descends 200 feet, touches down, and, after three painfully long minutes, resurfaces. 鈥淏reathe!鈥� his coach yells. He smiles, gulps, then breathes. His face is white. He tries to take off his mask, but his hands are cramped and shaking. Lack of oxygen has sapped his muscle control, and he just floats there, with blank eyes and an idiotic grin on his face, probably with no idea where he is.

Behind him another diver resurfaces. 鈥淏reathe! Breathe!鈥� a safety diver yells. The man鈥檚 face is blue, and he isn鈥檛 breathing. 鈥淏reathe!鈥� another yells. Finally he coughs, jiggles his head, and makes a tiny squeaking sound like a dolphin.

For the next half-hour, as divers come and go, these scenes repeat. I stand in the sailboat with my stomach tightening, wondering if this is the norm鈥攁nd if it is, how the hell any of it could be allowed. All the competitors sign waivers acknowledging that heart attacks, blackouts, oxygen toxicity, and drowning may be part of the price. But I have a feeling that competitive freediving鈥檚 continued existence has more to do with the fact that the local authorities don鈥檛 know what really goes on out here.

Trubridge arrives, wearing sunglasses and headphones, his lean spider limbs dangling from the oversize thorax that is his chest. I can see his gargantuan lungs heaving in and out from 30 feet away. He鈥檚 so lost in a meditative haze that he looks half dead by the time he enters the water, latches his ankle to the lanyard, and gets set to go.

鈥淔ive, four, three, two, one,鈥� the official says. Trubridge dives, kicking with bare feet, descending rapidly. The official announces 鈥渢wenty meters,鈥� and I watch through the clear blue water. Trubridge places his arms at his sides and floats down effortlessly until he鈥檚 out of sight, drifting barefoot into the shadows of the deep. The image is both beautiful and spooky. I try to hold my breath along with him and give up after 30 seconds.

Trubridge passes 100 feet, 150 feet, 200 feet. Almost two minutes into the dive, the sonar-monitoring official announces 鈥渢ouchdown鈥濃�攁t 305 feet鈥攁nd begins monitoring Trubridge鈥檚 progress on the way back up. After a total of 3 minutes and 43 seconds, I see Trubridge rematerialize from the shadows. A few more strokes and he surfaces, exhales, removes his goggles, gives the high sign, and says in his crisp New Zealand accent, 鈥淚鈥檓 OK.鈥� He looks bored, his body and brain seemingly unaffected by the fact that he just swam鈥攚ithout fins, without anything鈥�30 stories down.

The next two days are rest days. By midmorning on Tuesday, the courtyard at the Messinian Bay Hotel is buzzing with the chatter of a dozen languages as teams gather around patio tables to sip bottled water, talk strategy, and e-mail worried relatives. The group here is largely male, mostly over 30, and generally skinny. Some are short, a few are pudgy, and most have shaved heads and wear sleeveless T-shirts, action-strap Teva sandals, and baggy shorts. They hardly look like extreme athletes.

鈥淔reediving is as much a mental game as a physical one,鈥� says Trubridge, who, in his wraparound dark glasses, cropped hair, and worn-out T-shirt, fits right in. He pulls up a seat beside me at the swimming pool. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a sport that鈥檚 open to everybody.鈥�

Well, maybe. You still have to be able to hold your breath an incredibly long time, exert yourself tremendously, and not freak out鈥攕omething I find extremely challenging, even though I spend most of my spare time surfing. Recreational freediving is one of the fastest-growing watersports鈥攁 trend that will accelerate this year when expands its freediving courses to dozens of locations worldwide鈥攂ut it鈥檚 hard to imagine competitive freediving in the Olympics anytime soon. It just seems too damned dangerous. I ask Trubridge to walk me through the physics and physiology of what he endures. Before long my stomach is tightening again.

In the first 30 or so feet underwater, the lungs, full of air, buoy your body to the surface, requiring strenuous paddling and constant equalization of the middle-ear cavities to gain depth. 鈥淭his is where you use up to 15 percent of your energy,鈥� Trubridge says. And you鈥檝e still got 600 feet of swimming to go.

As you dive past 30 feet, you feel the pressure on your body double, compressing your lungs to about half their normal size. You suddenly feel weightless, your body suspended in a gravityless state called neutral buoyancy. Then something amazing happens: as you keep diving, the ocean no longer pushes your body toward the surface but instead pulls you relentlessly toward the seafloor below. You place your arms at your sides in a skydiver pose and effortlessly go deeper.

At 100 feet, the pressure has quadrupled, the ocean鈥檚 surface is barely visible, and you close your eyes and prepare for the deep water鈥檚 tightening clutch.

Further still, at 150 feet, you enter a dream state caused by the high levels of carbon dioxide and nitrogen gas in your bloodstream: for a moment, you can forget where you are and why. At 300 feet, the pressure is so extreme that your lungs shrink to the size of oranges and your heart beats at less than half its normal rate to conserve oxygen. You lose some motor control. Most of the blood in your arms and legs has flooded to your body鈥檚 core as the vessels in your extremities constrict. Vessels in your lungs swell to several times their normal size so they won鈥檛 be crushed by the incredible pressure.

Then comes the really hard part. You open your eyes, struggle to force your semiparalyzed hand to grab a ticket from the plate, and head back up. With the ocean鈥檚 weight working against you, you tap your meager energy reserves to swim toward the surface. Ascending to 200 feet, 150 feet, 100 feet, your lungs ache with an almost unbearable desire to breathe, your vision fades, and your chest convulses from the buildup of carbon dioxide in your bloodstream. You need to hurry before you black out. Above you, the haze of blue water transforms into a sheen of sunlight on the water鈥檚 surface. You鈥檙e going to make it.

You resurface, the world spins, people are yelling at you to breathe. Is this just another altered-state dream? It鈥檚 hard to tell. So you sit there, whacked out, trying to come to quickly enough to complete the surface protocol. You take off your goggles, flick a sign, say 鈥淚鈥檓 OK鈥濃�攖hen you get out of the way and make room for the next diver.

How do you decide this is something you want to do? That you can do?

鈥淚 was always drawn to the ocean,鈥� Trubridge shrugs when I ask him how he got into freediving. 鈥淢y first memories were of the sea.鈥� Born near the small village of Haltwhistle, Scotland, Trubridge was 20 months old when his parents, seeking adventure, sold their house, bought a 45-foot sailboat, loaded up Trubridge and his brother, Sam, and took off. For the next nine years they lived on the boat, sailing west. For fun, William and Sam would challenge each other to breath-holding dives. 鈥淲e probably made it to 25 or 30 feet,鈥� he says, then laughs. 鈥淲hich, you know, in retrospect was all pretty dangerous.鈥�

By the time Trubridge was 12, the family had settled in Havelock, a tiny town near New Zealand鈥檚 east coast. He studied genetic biology at the , where he tested himself one day to see if he could swim 80 feet underwater on one breath. One lap soon became two. Trubridge was slowly drawn into the sport.

After a stint in London as a bellhop in his early twenties, Trubridge took off for Honduras to explore freediving. 鈥淚 remember diving one day, to maybe 60 feet, and lying down in a sea garden, relaxing, meditating, watching all the life and just being part of the environment,鈥� he says. 鈥淣ot having to breathe for a minute or two. It was just the most amazing and peaceful feeling you can imagine.鈥�

For the next few years, Trubridge dropped out and dedicated himself full-time to freediving, honing his body into a machine built for undersea performance. He trained for hours a day, every day, swimming, doing yoga and breathing exercises. A rower and junior chess champion, Trubridge found that the combination of mental and physical training came naturally to him. 鈥淔reediving requires body, mind, and even spirit to be aligned and directed toward a common intent,鈥� he says. 鈥淚鈥檓 the sort of person who requires a challenge.鈥� When not diving, he translated freediving manuals, taught, and studied videotapes. At the end of a two-year stint bouncing around Central America, the Bahamas, and Europe, he hit the freediving scene as one of the best in the world.

鈥淗ere鈥檚 a guy who spent two years sitting on a mountain alone, just waiting,鈥� says , a Swedish freediver. 鈥淎nd when he came down, he was just kind of unstoppable.鈥�

Between 2007 and 2010, Trubridge broke 14 world records (mostly his own) in the disciplines of constant weight no fins and free immersion, which allows divers to pull on the rope to gain depth and to ascend. Today he and his wife of two years, Brittany, live mostly out of suitcases, wintering in the Bahamas and summering in Europe. They teach courses between competitions to help make ends meet.

I wonder what keeps Trubridge bound to the sport. It can鈥檛 be the money: at the world championships, competitors pay about $700 to dive, plus accommodations, and win nothing but a medal. He makes a pittance through sponsorships. It鈥檚 not the fame, either. Few people outside freediving know who he is.

鈥淭o me, I don鈥檛 really have a choice,鈥� he says in a soft voice. 鈥淭here is an immortal peace confronting the underwater world on its own terms, with your breath at your breast. The ocean is just where I am meant to be.鈥�

It’s Thursday, and the glassy blue waters of Messinian Bay are gray and wind-chopped from a storm that came through yesterday. It鈥檚 not raining now but clouds loom overhead, and subsurface visibility has diminished to about 40 feet. By 9 a.m. the first divers are in the water.

This time they鈥檙e using monofins鈥攖hree-foot-wide wedges of plastic attached to neoprene boots. Compared with traditional fins (one on each foot), a monofin gives a diver more thrust with less effort. As a result, today鈥檚 dives will be about 25 percent deeper than the no-fins dives on Monday. The current world record in this category (called constant weight with fins, or CWT) is 124 meters鈥攎ore than 400 feet鈥攕et in 2010 by Herbert Nitsch. Until 2009, only ten freedivers in the world had reached that mark. Today, 15 competitors will be attempting 100 meters, an almost unheard-of number.

British diver is one of them. King surprised everyone last night by announcing that he would try a 102-meter dive (335 feet), which would be a new UK national record. According to his teammates, he hasn鈥檛 gone deeper than 80 meters in the past twelve months.

The judge counts down. King wets his head, upends, and goes. I watch from the sailboat as his silhouette fades into the gray water below like a headlight disappearing in fog.

鈥淢y God, he is flying down,鈥� says , a South African freediver who has joined me on the prow of the boat. Speed isn鈥檛 necessarily a good thing in freediving, she reminds me. The faster King goes, the more energy he burns and the less oxygen he鈥檒l have for his ascent.

鈥淓ighty meters, ninety meters,鈥� the dive official says. 鈥淭ouchdown,鈥� he announces, and King starts coming back up.

鈥淣inety meters, eighty meters.鈥� Then the official pauses. King is coming up at about half the speed of his descent. At 60 meters, the updates come slower. At 40 meters they stop altogether.

Five seconds pass. King has been underwater for more than two minutes. 鈥淔orty meters,鈥� the official repeats. Pause. 鈥淔orty meters.鈥�

A sickening anticipation sets in. I look around the sailboat. The officials, divers, and crews all stare at the choppy water and wait. And wait.

鈥淭hirty meters.鈥�

King appears to be moving, but too slowly. Five more seconds. He should have surfaced by now, but he鈥檚 still 100 feet down. Five more seconds. 鈥淭hirty meters,鈥� the official repeats.

鈥淥h God,鈥� says Prinsloo, holding her hand over her mouth. Five more seconds. In the water we see nothing鈥攏o sign of King, no ripples at the surface, no movement.

鈥淭hirty meters.鈥� Silence. 鈥淭hirty meters.鈥�

鈥淏lackout!鈥� a safety diver yells. King is unconscious ten stories below the surface. The divers kick down into the water.

鈥淪afety!鈥� the judge on line three yells. About 30 seconds later, the water around the line explodes in a cauldron of white wash. The wetsuit-covered heads of two safety divers reappear. Between them is King. His face is bright blue, and he鈥檚 not moving. His neck is stiff.

The divers push his face out of the water. His cheeks, mouth, and chin are slicked with blood. 鈥淏reathe! Breathe!鈥� the divers yell. No response. Bright drops of blood drip from King鈥檚 chin into the ocean.

鈥淐PR! CPR!鈥� the judge yells. A diver puts his mouth over King鈥檚 blood-covered mouth and blows. 鈥淐PR now!鈥� the judge yells. King鈥檚 coach, Dave Kent, is yelling into King鈥檚 ear: 鈥�Dave! Dave!鈥� No response. Ten seconds pass and still nothing. Someone yells for oxygen. Someone else for CPR. Georgoulis screams, 鈥淲hy isn鈥檛 anyone calling a medic? Get a helicopter!鈥� Everyone is yelling.

Behind us, on line one, another diver heads down. Then another surfaces, blacked out. The safety divers move King鈥檚 stick-figure form to the flotilla and punch an oxygen mask to his face. Still no response. His facial muscles are frozen into a sickly smile, his eyes wide and lost, staring out at the open sea.

The consensus on the sailboat is that King has died. But we鈥檙e 40 feet away from him now, and nobody can really tell what鈥檚 happening. The safety crew keep pumping his chest, tapping his face, yelling. 鈥淒ave! Dave!鈥�

Then, miraculously, King鈥檚 fingers quiver, his lips flutter, and he breathes. Color returns to his face; his eyes open, then softly close again. He is breathing deeply, tapping his coach鈥檚 leg to let him know he鈥檚 OK.

In the wake of all this, Trubridge attempts a 118-meter dive on line one, but he turns around early and fails his surface protocol. British freediver turns back after just 22 meters on a world-record attempt. 鈥淚 couldn鈥檛 do it,鈥� she says, hopping back on the sailboat. She was too shaken by King, who鈥檚 now being taken by motorboat to a hospital. As it races back to shore, there鈥檚 another blackout on line two. Then another on three.

鈥淢y God, this is getting messy,鈥� says Campbell. The west winds are up now, chopping the ocean, fluttering the sail above us. 鈥淚t鈥檚 like dominoes. Everything鈥檚 falling apart. This is the worst I鈥檝e ever seen.鈥�

The competition goes on for three more hours. On the last dive of the day, a Ukrainian, new to the sport, attempts a beginning descent of 40 meters. He surfaces and removes his mask to flash the OK sign, and a stream of blood gushes from his nose. Then he completes the surface protocol and is awarded a white card. The dive is accepted. Blood is OK.

That night at the hotel the divers cavort, some laugh, others casually shake their heads at all the drama. Of the day鈥檚 93 competitors, 15 attempted dives of 100 meters or more. Of those, two were disqualified, three came up short, and four blacked out鈥攁 60 percent failure rate. King is in the hospital. Nobody knows for sure, but the rumor is that the pressure tore his larynx, which is fairly common on deep dives. A minor injury, they say.

鈥淭his kind of thing never happens,鈥� the divers repeat over and over, rolling their eyes. But I think this kind of thing happens all the time: it鈥檚 just that nobody here wants to admit it. The challenge now is to see who can move beyond today鈥檚 鈥渕essy鈥� events, erase them from their minds, and dive to even greater depths on the final day of competition.

One person who seems unfazed is Guillaume N茅ry, a 29-year-old French freediver and the winner of yesterday鈥檚 CWT competition. The day after King鈥檚 near-death episode, I meet him midmorning at a table crowded with other members of the French team.

鈥淚 was not there, so don鈥檛 know exactly,鈥� he says in a thick accent. 鈥淏ut I think the main mistake is not for Dave King but for all freedivers. They were focused on this 100-meter number and not on their feelings, not what they really want to do.鈥� N茅ry, who started freediving at 14, gained international fame last year with the release of a short film that follows him on a 13-story freedive in the Bahamas. The clip has been viewed on YouTube more than 10 million times.

鈥淚 learned long ago that patience is the key to success in freediving,鈥� he says. 鈥淵ou have to forget the target, to enjoy and relax in the water.鈥� N茅ry smiles and runs his fingers through his mop of sandy hair, mentioning that he hasn鈥檛 blacked out in more than five years of steady freediving. 鈥淲hat is important now is trying to do the dive, surface, and have a smile on my face. That鈥檚 what I did.鈥�

Not everybody is so philosophical. 鈥淏lacking out is like shitting yourself,鈥� Sebastian N盲slund tells me. 鈥淚t鈥檚 an embarrassment to you and everyone else around you.鈥� Fred Buyle, who became one of the first competitive freedivers in the 1990s and is now retired, echoes N盲slund. 鈥淗onestly, I think the guy is a fucking idiot,鈥� he says of King. 鈥淚 thought he was dead. His coach thought he was dead. I鈥檝e been freediving since 1990, and that鈥檚 the worst I鈥檝e ever seen.鈥�

Months later, King tells me by e-mail that he is aware of the criticism he received and offers his own perspective on what happened. 鈥淚 am not a reckless diver,鈥� he writes, noting that the blackout in Greece was his only one in ten years of freediving. He argues that his work schedule doesn鈥檛 allow him to train as much as other elite divers and that he had time for only three dives before the competition. 鈥淚 got to 102 meters, equalizing easily,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 just had problems as I reached the surface.鈥�

Saturday, the final day of competition, brings scalding sunshine, still air, and clear, calm waters鈥攑erfect conditions. The discipline today is free immersion, where divers are allowed to pull themselves down the line to reach their target depth. Free-immersion dives are a little shallower than CWT, but they can take a while, sometimes more than four minutes, making them excruciating to watch. The divers got a wrist slap last night from event director Stavros Kastrinakis, who told them, 鈥淒ive your limits.鈥� The announced dives today appear to be more conservative. Still, there are a number of world- and national-record attempts planned.

As the morning unfolds, more blackouts occur, but today they don鈥檛 look so bad. Or maybe I鈥檓 just getting used to the sight of inert bodies and blue faces. Most competitors recover quickly, then swim back to the boat in silence, ashamed to have, again, pushed beyond their limits.

I keep watching as the next dozen athletes make their dives. Then the elite divers begin: Malina Mateusz of Poland breaks a national record with a dive of 106 meters. The women鈥檚 world champion, Russian Natalia Molchanova, . Anton Koderman dives 105 meters to set a new Slovenian mark. N茅ry breaks the French record with 103. Trubridge does 112, almost effortlessly. Seven national records are broken in an hour. Everyone is in control. The sport, again, is awe inspiring and beautiful.

Then, at line two, a commotion breaks out. The safety divers have lost a Czech diver named Michal Risian. Literally lost him. He鈥檚 at least 200 feet underwater, but the sonar is no longer picking him up. He has somehow drifted away from the rope.

鈥淪afety! Safety!鈥� yells the judge. The safety divers go down but come up a minute later with nothing. 鈥淪afety! Safety! Now!鈥� Thirty seconds pass. No sign of Risian anywhere.

On line one, Sara Campbell is preparing to dive. From below her, three and a half minutes after he went down on line two, Risian emerges鈥�40 feet away from the line he was first attached to.

There鈥檚 confusion. Campbell jerks away, frightened. Risian snaps off his goggles, saying, 鈥淒on鈥檛 touch me. I鈥檓 OK.鈥� Then he swims back to the sailboat under his own steam. He plops down on a seat beside me on the hull, laughs, and says, 鈥淲ow, that was a weird dive.鈥�

Yeah, that鈥檚 one way of putting it. Before Risian鈥檚 dive and per the usual routine, his coach attached the lanyard on Risian鈥檚 right ankle to the line. As Risian turned and plummeted, the Velcro securing the lanyard came loose and fell off. The safety divers saw it floating, unattached, and rushed down to stop Risian, but he was already gone, 100 feet deep. Risian, unaware, closed his eyes, meditated, and drifted downward. But he wasn鈥檛 going straight down鈥攈e was angling 45 degrees away from the line, into open ocean.

Risian鈥檚 coach, realizing that death was the likely outcome of this screwup, floated motionless at the surface, gazing at the safety divers, who were too stunned to blink. 鈥淚鈥檒l remember their looks for a long time,鈥� he said later. 鈥淭error, awe, fear, and sadness.鈥�

Meanwhile, 250 feet below, Risian was diving farther down and farther away, oblivious to the problem. At 272 feet, he reached out to grab the metal plate, but there was no plate. 鈥淚 couldn鈥檛 see any tickets, any plate, any rope, nothing,鈥� he said. 鈥淚 was completely lost. Even when I turned up and looked around, I saw only blue.鈥�

At 29 stories down, even in the clearest water, all directions look the same. And all directions feel the same鈥攖he water pressure makes it impossible to gauge whether you鈥檙e swimming up or down, east or west.

For a moment, Risian panicked. Then he calmed himself, knowing that panic would only kill him faster. 鈥淚n one direction there was a bit more light,鈥� he told me. 鈥淚 figured that this is where the surface was.鈥� He figured wrong. Risian was swimming horizontally. But as he swam, trying to remain conscious and calm, he saw a white rope. 鈥淚 knew if I could find the rope, I would be OK,鈥� he said.

The chances of Risian finding a line 250 feet down鈥攅specially one so far from his original line of descent鈥攚ere, I would estimate, about the same as hitting a particular number on a roulette wheel. Twice. But there it was, the line Sara Campbell was about to descend, some 40 feet away from where he had first gone down. Risian grabbed it, aimed for the surface, and somehow made it up before he drowned.

On the final night, the divers, coaches, and judges gather on the beach for closing ceremonies. Strobes and spotlights glare from an enormous stage, Euro pop blasts from a DJ booth, and a crowd of a few hundred dance and drink beneath a night sky sequined with stars. Behind the stage a bonfire rages, heating the bare, wet bodies of those who couldn鈥檛 resist one last splash.

All told, the divers broke two world and 48 national records. Competitors also suffered 19 blackouts. Trubridge won gold in both constant weight no fins and free immersion.

鈥淩isian is the real winner here,鈥� says Trubridge, sipping a beer beside his wife, Brittany. Behind us, every 20 minutes or so, an enormous video screen shows the chilling footage of Risian鈥檚 tetherless dive, which was recorded on underwater cameras. At the end of the video, the crowd cheers and Risian, who鈥檚 had a few, rushes to the stage to take a bow. Dave King, the diver who suffered the horrific blackout just two days ago, walks through the crowd with the British team, smiling and seemingly in perfect health. N茅ry, in quintessential French style, is smoking a cigarette.

鈥淭here is such a strong community here,鈥� says Hanli Prinsloo, drinking a cocktail by the bonfire. 鈥淚t鈥檚 like all of us, we have no choice. We have to be in the water, we鈥檝e chosen to live our lives in it, and by doing that we accept its risks.鈥� She takes a sip. 鈥淏ut we also reap its rewards.鈥�

I begin to understand her point. Freedivers have access to a world that the rest of us see only from the surface鈥攆rom boats, surfboards, and airplanes 36,000 feet up. It鈥檚 safe, where most of us are, but it鈥檚 also isolating: we can never know the ocean鈥檚 true wonder, power, strength, or beauty. The real mysteries of nature are revealed to those who reach farther, push harder, and go deeper.

For freedivers, access to the hidden universe that covers 70 percent of the planet is worth the price of admission鈥攂lackouts, ripped larynxes, and all. And blood? What鈥檚 a little blood when you鈥檝e made it to the other side?

The post Open Your Mouth and You’re Dead appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

The Year of Giving Adventurously

Citizen philanthropy is on the rise鈥攁nd so are the nonprofits. Here are the 30 organizations and innovators truly making a difference, delivering health care in rural Asia, distributing bikes in Africa, and championing preservation in your backyard. Plus: Carbon-eating superplants, why the solar-powered car is MIA, and more.

THE ORGANIZATIONS
Shelterbox
American Himalayan Foundation
Oceana
Kiva
1% for the Planet
Big City Mountaineers
African Wildlife Foundation
American Forests
World Bicycle Relief
Water For People
Climate Counts
Ioby
American Trails
The Marine Mammal Center
Afghan Child Education and Care Organization
Foundation Rwanda
Environmental Defense Fund
Trekking for Kids
American Rivers
Health in Harmony
Pathfinder International
Rainforest Alliance
Technoserve
Vital Voices Global Partnership
World Wildlife Fund
THE INNOVATORS
David Belt
Amy Purdy
Jon Rose

Dan Morrison
HOW TO GIVE RESPONSIBLY
How We Picked Them
Do Diligence

听

Shelterbox

Cornwall, England

BY THE NUMBERS: More than one million natural-颅disaster victims supplied since 2001
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Tom Henderson, 61, a former Royal Navy search-and-rescue diver and offshore-drilling consultant
WHAT IT DOES: Henderson established in 2000 to offer practical tools to disaster victims so they can help themselves, an approach designed to foster self-reliance and self-esteem. Each $1,000 kit, which comes in a durable box that doubles as a storage container or crib, contains a family tent (颅torture-tested to withstand high winds, heavy rain, and 颅extreme temperatures), blankets, a multifuel stove, a cookset, a water filtration 颅system, tools, and an activity pack for kids. Teams of volunteers deploy to disaster sites鈥攐ften within 24 hours鈥攈and-deliver boxes, and teach families how to use them. ShelterBox spent more than $19 million on programs last year; since 2001, it has distributed 110,000 boxes in 150 disaster zones, including the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, 颅Hurricane Katrina, and the Haiti earthquake.
EXTRA CREDIT: Individual donations鈥攚hich go straight to paying for box contents鈥攃an be followed with tracking numbers.
LOOKING AHEAD: Shelter颅Box recently revamped its Shelter颅Box Academy, which trains hundreds of volunteers every year to operate in harsh, remote locales. It鈥檚 now offering more courses for the public, including university classes, corporate team training, and first-aid programs, which raise funds for volunteer education.

American Himalayan Foundation

San Francisco

BY THE NUMBERS: 300,000 Nepalis, Tibetans, and Sherpas served by 140 education, health care, and human-welfare 颅programs this year alone
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Erica Stone, 60, a University of California at Berkeley MBA and former documentary-film production manager who has trekked extensively in Nepal
WHAT IT DOES: The (AHF) was established 30 years ago when financier Richard Blum and a group of climbers and trekkers recognized threats to Himalayan culture from 颅unstable governments and a lack of basic 颅services. AHF supports local partners with the funding, 颅technical 颅assistance, and strategy advice they need. In 2010, the organization provided $3.3 million to these partners for projects in 颅education, health care, and cultural preservation in 颅Nepal, Tibet, and Tibetan refugee settlements in India. 颅Projects range from establishing a hospital for disabled children in Kathmandu to training locals in the Nepali region of Mustang to preserve 15th-century Buddhist temples. One notable 颅current issue: an education-based prevention program 颅fighting human traffickers, who lure as many as 20,000 rural 颅Nepali girls into prostitution or 颅oppressive 颅domestic-servant jobs each year. Board member Jon Krakauer has donated 100 percent of the proceeds from his 2011 e-book 鈥淭hree Cups of 颅Deceit鈥濃�攁n 颅investigation into the practices of 颅Central Asia 颅Institute founder Greg 颅Mortenson鈥攖o the 颅foundation鈥檚 anti-trafficking 颅program, which sponsors the girls鈥� schooling and has assisted more than 10,000 girls over the past 15 years.
EXTRA CREDIT: AHF is creative and committed; spending on programs is consistently high at more than 80 percent.
LOOKING AHEAD: One of AHF鈥檚 newest projects is the Tibetan Enterprise Fund, which offers grants and small loans to Tibetan refugees who have viable small-business and farming ideas.
听

Oceana

Washington, D.C.

BY THE NUMBERS: Since 2001, 鈥檚 research and political outreach have helped persuade governments to increase protections for 1.2 million square miles of ocean
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Andrew Sharpless, 56, a Harvard Law and London School of Economics grad who鈥檚 held top jobs at RealNetworks, New York City鈥檚 颅Museum of Television and Radio, and Discovery.com
WHAT IT DOES: In 1999, several foundations鈥攊ncluding the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund鈥攃ommissioned a study on ocean advocacy and realized that only a tiny fraction of money spent by environmental nonprofits was aimed at ocean protection. Two years later, Oceana was born with a practical mandate: to conduct studies and research, inform lawmakers, and protect degraded oceans through concrete policy. The approach has gotten results. Chile banned shark finning, announced the creation of the world鈥檚 fourth-largest no-take marine reserve, and reformed salmon-industry practices to protect wild fish populations. The U.S. also banned shark finning in its coastal 颅waters, and Morocco and Turkey outlawed drift nets, already prohibited by the European Union and the United Nations.
EXTRA CREDIT: Oceana can point to dozens of policy victories on four continents in the past ten years. And it鈥檚 one of only a few charities to receive a four-star rating from Charity Navigator three years in a row.
LOOKING AHEAD: Oceana has devised a practical road map to wean the U.S. from Gulf of Mexico oil through measures like switching oil-heated homes to electric power and electrifying 10 percent of cars by 2020鈥攁 plan that received a grant from the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy last year.
听

Kiva

San Francisco

BY THE NUMBERS: Since 2005, more than 628,000 颅citizen lenders have provided $248 million in microloans to small entrepreneurs in developing countries
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Matt Flannery, 34, a former software engineer at TiVo
WHAT IT DOES: In 2004, Flannery was working as a programmer when he took a trip to East Africa to make a documentary about entrepreneurs and saw how much difference small investments can make. In 2005, he launched , which connects citizen philanthropists directly to borrowers in developing countries. In a typical transaction, a potential lender peruses Kiva鈥檚 online listings of hopeful borrowers, chosen with help from partner organizations in the field. The lender picks one and makes a loan of $25 or more through PayPal. The borrower鈥攁 Tajik peddler hoping to buy rice, say, or a Kenyan farmer buying animal feed鈥攎akes the purchase and then repays the loan, which is available for the donor鈥檚 withdrawal or future loans. Within six months of Kiva鈥檚 founding, all seven of the original borrowers, including a goat herder, a fishmonger, and a restaurant owner, had repaid their loans. Now borrowers hail from 60 countries, and their businesses encompass everything from a Bulgarian bicycle-repair shop to an Internet caf茅 in Benin.
EXTRA CREDIT: Philanthropy experts say it often takes an 颅individual鈥檚 story to move 颅donors to give. Flannery and Kiva harness that impulse, 颅taking affordable, crowdsourced lending to new levels around the world.
LOOKING AHEAD: In June, Kiva, now working with an $11 million budget, announced its first U.S. microfinance 颅programs, in Detroit and New Orleans.
听

1% for the Planet

Waitsfield, Vermont

BY THE NUMBERS: In 2010, 1,450 companies donated $22 million to environmental organizations through 1%.
WHO鈥橲 IN CHARGE: Terry Kellogg, 39, a Yale-trained MBA who was the first director of environmental stewardship at Timberland.
WHAT IT DOES: In 2001, 颅Patagonia founder Yvon 颅Choui颅nard and Craig Matthews, the owner of Blue Ribbon Flies, hatched a simple plan to encour颅age 颅businesses to give back to the environment. A business pledges to donate 1 percent of sales to vetted 颅environmental groups鈥斅璱ncluding several on this list鈥攁nd agrees to be 颅audited annually. In exchange, it can display the 1% logo, designed to encourage consumers to support companies that are giving back. Since then, the organization has raised close to $100 million for more than 2,500 groups, from American Forests to the Shawangunk Conservancy. The money has 颅powered high-impact projects like the Seed Alliance, which is using money from Clif Bar to establish a seed bank to conserve genetic crop diversity. Now signs on an average of one new member every day鈥攆rom small wineries to large manufacturers in 45 countries鈥攁nd is on track to become the largest network of environmental funders on the planet.
EXTRA CREDIT: For decades, Chouinard has put his money where his good intentions are.
LOOKING AHEAD: 1% recently enlisted 14 people鈥斅璱ncluding musician Jack Johnson and 颅国产吃瓜黑料鈥檚 own Christopher Keyes鈥攖o help spread the word.
听

Big City Mountaineers

Denver

BY THE NUMBERS: More than 15,000 urban teenagers have taken part in sponsored outdoor trips since 1989.
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Executive director Lisa Mattis, 41, former director of individual giving and director of the scholarship program for Outward Bound
WHAT IT DOES: (BCM) gives underprivileged city kids a chance to experience wilderness adventure. Roughly 83 percent of urban teens who participate in BCM鈥檚 trips live below the poverty line, 62 percent have never been outside their home counties, and the vast majority have never seen a starry sky. Drawing on an annual budget of $1.5 million, this 22-year-old nonprofit takes young city dwellers from Denver, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon, on seven-day hiking or canoeing trips in settings like the Boundary Waters and Yosemite National Park. Along the way, volunteer leaders guide teens through a series of challenges that culminate in summiting a peak or completing a long river portage. BCM has devised innovative fundraising techniques, including , in which participants challenge themselves in the same way BCM kids might鈥攂y tackling a guided climb of a difficult peak and raising funds through sponsorships. This year, North Face鈥搒ponsored athlete Cedar Wright signed on, choosing a self-guided climb on a remote Malaysian island. He hopes to raise $10,000.
EXTRA CREDIT: BCM offers diverse ways to get involved and is one of the largest wilderness programs for urban kids.
LOOKING AHEAD: The group has added single-day and overnight programs to augment its seven-day courses. These offer gateway programs for kids intimidated by longer outings.
听

African Wildlife Foundation

Nairobi, Kenya

BY THE NUMBERS: Currently backing 31 conservation-oriented projects that generate more than $2 million annually for African communities; spent $19 million on programs in 2010
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Patrick Bergin, 47, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania and project officer for the foundation in Tanzania鈥檚 national parks
WHAT IT DOES: Launched in 1961, the (AWF) is one of a growing number of NGOs pushing a more inclusive 颅approach to conservation based on a simple philosophy: local people should be factored into the equation. AWF starts by sending field researchers to identify species and landscapes at risk, then employs a host of education, advocacy, and development plans to give local people sound reasons to care for their land and wildlife. One method is what the AWF calls conservation enterprises鈥攕ustainable businesses like wildlife tourism and eco-sensitive agriculture. In 2008, AWF partnered with Rwandan communities to build the swanky, locally owned Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge near Volcanoes National Park. It now attracts well-heeled tourists who come to see rare mountain gorillas, generating a flow of dollars that supports locals with infrastructure and development projects. AWF also brokered a deal between Starbucks and small coffee growers in Kenya. In exchange for adhering to strict ethical guidelines for both labor and cultivation, Starbucks offers farmers lucrative contracts.
EXTRA CREDIT: AWF earned a top rating from the American Institute of Philanthropy. Thanks to its success, its people-centered programs have been emulated widely, particularly in the past decade.
LOOKING AHEAD: The group recently launched a website () that catalogs community-owned safari lodges that conscientious travelers can visit.
听

American Forests

Washington, D.C.

BY THE NUMBERS: Nearly 40 million trees planted in the past 21 years
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Scott Steen, 47, former executive 颅director of the American Ceramic Society, an organization for cera颅mic engineers and scientists
WHAT IT DOES: Forests are the planet鈥檚 most effective carbon sinks, so their health has never been more important. Which is why newly appointed CEO Steen is revamping this old-guard conservation organization鈥攆ounded in 1875 to establish and protect state and national forests鈥攊nto a force to battle climate change, boost river and habitat quality, and improve recreation areas. With nearly a third of the staff replaced and a new science advisory board 颅installed, the group is now largely focused on reforestation projects in 颅response to urban need and devastation from wildfires, insect infestations, agricultural clearing, and 颅pollution. This year, introduced 54 new 颅projects, ranging from a 27,000-tree planting effort near Oregon鈥檚 Klamath River鈥攖o prevent erosion into tribal fisheries owned by the Yurok, Karuk, and Hoopa people鈥攖o a project in Cameroon that involves planting 50,000 trees.
EXTRA CREDIT: In the face of climate change and clean-water shortages, forest health has never been more important. American Forests has earned a top rating from the American Institute of Philanthropy.
LOOKING AHEAD: Whitebark pines are known as a keystone species with an outsize ability to enhance ecosystem diversity; they鈥檙e also nearly extinct in some parts of the Rockies. American Forests is working with the Forest Service and a team of researchers to identify and breed disease-resistant trees.

World Bicycle Relief

Chicago

BY THE NUMBERS: More than 88,000 bikes distributed and sold in developing nations since 2005
WHO'S IN CHARGE: F. K. Day, 51, executive vice president of SRAM Corporation, the largest bicycle-component manufacturer in the U.S.
WHAT IT DOES: Shortly after the 2004 tsunami hit, Day traveled to Sri Lanka, saw the apocalyptic devastation firsthand, and realized there was a simple, brilliant invention that could speed reconstruction and improve lives: bicycles. Bikes are at least four times as fast as walking and can carry up to five times as much cargo as a person. They improve access to health care and education and facilitate commerce. To put more of them in service, Day created a virtually indestructible, easily fixable bike that costs about $134 to produce. By 2006, (WBR) was born and, in partnership with the NGO World Vision, had distributed more than 24,000 free bikes to Sri Lankans. Since then the organization has built assembly plants in Kenya, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, trained locals to construct bikes, and taught some 700 local mechan颅ics how to maintain them. Now it partners with reputable NGOs already in the field to identify populations in need and create contracts with individuals who promote using the free bikes for productive purposes like getting to school. In 2010, they spent $2.5 million on bikes, plants, and programs.
EXTRA CREDIT: WBR tracks the effects of its programs through third-party studies. Day was picked as one of the top 25 philanthropists by Barron鈥檚 and the Global Philanthropy Group last year.
LOOKING AHEAD: The bikes are so sturdy that volunteers at organizations like the World Health Organization and Catholic Relief Services in Africa requested to buy them. Two years ago, World Bicycle Relief initiated a program to sell bikes to organizations; proceeds benefit WBR charitable 颅programs. In 2012, WBR will open a fourth 颅assembly plant, in South Africa.
听

Water for People

Denver

BY THE NUMBERS: The group helped more than 188,000 people gain access to clean water in 2010.
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Ned 颅Breslin, 46, formerly a Mozam颅bique country representative for WaterAid, health and hygiene education manager for Mvula Trust, and development director for Operation Hunger
WHAT IT DOES: It鈥檚 estimated that 884 million people lack 颅access to a reliable supply of clean drinking water. Each of 鈥檚 projects, carried out in countries from India to Peru, is based on the organization鈥檚 four guiding principles: everyone in an aided community gets access to water and sanitation; representatives from local government, NGOs, and the local business community all must sign on to the plan; commitments must span at least ten years; and solutions, such as wells, storage tanks, gravity-fed piping systems, and latrines, are designed to last and grow as populations expand. In an ongoing project in Malawi, 48 new water kiosks were constructed. A local entrepreneur returns regularly to purchase the compost. His family earns enough to pay off the loan and save money, and the businessman sells the compost to farmers for a profit. To support the programs, which cost nearly $10 million per year, the organization has devised innovative fundraising initiatives. The 颅latest: mountaineer Jake Norton is climbing each continent鈥檚 three highest summits to raise $2.1 million in donations.
EXTRA CREDIT: For seven years in a row, the project has earned a four-star rating from Charity Navigator.
LOOKING AHEAD: Water for People just released a beta version of FLOW (field-level operations watch), a new monitoring system in which field workers use a cell-phone app to update the WFP website with the status of clean-water access in remote areas. Donors and staffers can chart progress on an online map updated in real time, sending money and volunteers to places that need it most.
听

Climate Counts

Manchester, New Hampshire

BY THE NUMBERS: 150 major companies, from Disney to General Electric, are rated annually on their climate practices
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Mike Bellamente, 35, who led a team from the U.S. Economic Development Administration to study how communities were affected by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill
WHAT IT DOES: Launched in 2007 and operated by a small team of sustainability experts and more than a dozen independent researchers, uses a scorecard for corporations, rating them on 22 criteria in four areas: carbon footprint, efforts to reduce impact, support for climate-friendly legislation, and public transparency. With a $350,000 annual budget, the group now looks at companies in 16 high-visibility industries, including airlines, hotels, electronics, food products, and toys. The goal is to encourage consumers to vote with their dollars鈥斅璻atings are available through the website, a pocket guide, and a mobile app鈥攁nd to spur executives to reduce their companies鈥� carbon output. Many firms have embraced the ratings concept; some have even hired corporate sustainability directors as a result.
EXTRA CREDIT: The group leverages a tiny staff鈥檚 efforts into positive changes on a large scale. Renowned sustainability journalist and consultant Joel Makower as well as Gary 颅Hirshberg, founder of Stonyfield Farm, a corporate sustainability leader, sit on the board.
LOOKING AHEAD: In 2010, Climate Counts began offering audits, verification ratings, and workshops for smaller, unrated companies that elect to be scrutinized. The group is expanding its ratings with a new scorecard on water use.
听

IOBY

New York City

BY THE NUMBERS: (In Our Back Yards) has raised more than $130,000 for 100 neighborhood environmental projects in New York since 2009.
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Erin Barnes, 31, a former community organizer for the Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition
WHAT IT DOES: In 2007, Barnes, Cassie Flynn, and Brandon Whitney鈥攁ll recent grads of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies master鈥檚 program鈥攎oved to New York City and noticed a curious trend in the environmental movement. Movies like An Inconvenient Truth had galvanized people to take action, but the problems seemed so large and distant that the energy was channeled mainly into green consumerism. Using a digital platform from , the three launched a pilot website that posts environmental projects in the city that could use money and volunteers. Soon, locals in all five boroughs were posting projects like urban farm startups in empty lots, beach cleanups, and beautification days for city parks. With help from IOBY, a group called Velo City raised some $3,000 to support an urban-education program called Bikesploration.
EXTRA CREDIT: IOBY is a young startup but readily supplies financial reports. It鈥檚 backed by more than a dozen foundations, including the Kresge Foundation and the Jack Johnson Ohana Foundation.
LOOKING AHEAD: After the successful NYC pilot鈥攖his year IOBY expects to raise 颅another $100,000 for neighborhood environmental projects there鈥攑lans are afoot to expand to up to three more U.S. cities in the next two years, using $250,000 in seed money from foundations.

American Trails

Redding, California

BY THE NUMBERS: The world鈥檚 largest advocacy group for planning, building, and managing trails and greenways
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Pam Gluck, 54, former state trails 颅coordinator for Arizona, 颅recreation director for Pinetop-Lakeside, Arizona, and 颅cross-country ski guide
WHAT IT DOES: Chances are, if you walked any new trails in the U.S. in the past 20 years, (AT) played a part in establishing them. The 20,000-member outfit is the only national organization dedicated to building, expanding, and safeguarding trail systems for all users, from hikers, 颅bikers, runners, and equestrians to dirt-bike and ATV riders. Oper颅ating on an annual budget of $295,000, AT provides hundreds of member organizations with guidelines on how to plan trail systems, write grant proposals, negotiate rights of way, and manage urban and backcountry trails. (For example, the Sacramento River National Recreation Trail in California and the Arkansas River Trail in Little Rock were recently built with help from AT.) It secures funding for trail building and maintenance by knocking on doors on Capitol Hill and at numerous federal agencies, including the Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. AT contracts with these agencies to run training sessions for trail crews and sponsors an annual national symposium for trail builders and advocates.
EXTRA CREDIT: A host of 颅government agencies, including the Forest Service and the 颅National Park Service, endorse AT, which supports some 22,000 members and 500 grassroots trails organizations.
LOOKING AHEAD: Two years ago, manufacturer GameTime, research firm PlayCore, the Natural Learning Initiative, and American Trails launched Pathways for Play, a program designed to keep kids outside and to help fight childhood obesity. The pilot project, PlayTrails, debuted in an urban park in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 2010 with six play areas on a half-mile trail. PlayTrails have since debuted in Missouri and North Carolina, and more than a dozen communities nationwide plan to build them.

The Marine Mammal Center

Sausalito, California

BY THE NUMBERS: 30,000 people schooled in marine-science programs each year; approximately 17,000 marine mammals rescued since its inception
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Executive director Jeffrey R. Boehm, 50, formerly the senior vice president of animal health and conservation science for the Great Lakes Conservation Awareness initiative at the John G. Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and a onetime veterinarian at the Los Angeles Zoo
WHAT IT DOES: In 1975, when the (MMC) was founded, this seaside rescue-and-rehab outfit was little more than a first-aid clinic housed in a collection of kiddie pools. Now it鈥檚 the largest operation of its kind in the United States, rescuing hundreds of sea mammals each year (from dolphins to newborn seal pups) that are malnourished or have been stranded, beached, shot, struck by boats, bitten by sharks, or tangled in fishing nets. After receiving veterinary care, the creatures are returned to the wild or鈥攊f they鈥檙e unlikely to survive release鈥攖ransferred to aquariums or zoos. During the mammals鈥� captivity, kids from preschool to college age are allowed to come in for a look, and MMC offers educational programs that inspire many of them to consider careers in marine biology. Meanwhile, the group鈥檚 16-颅person veterinary-science unit has collaborated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and numerous universities on research topics like the effects of toxic-algae poisoning, a natural occurrence 颅exacerbated by agricultural runoff and warming seas.
EXTRA CREDIT: MMC transforms a simple mission into a force for conservation through education and science. It earned top marks from the American Institute of Philanthropy.
LOOKING AHEAD: Marine mammals are bellwethers of environmental changes, not least because they鈥檙e at the top of the food chain. MMC鈥檚 ongoing research鈥攆or example, on the potential link between PCBs and startlingly high rates of reproductive cancer among seals and sea lions鈥攃ould help shed light on how those changes affect our health.
听

Afghan Child Education and Care Organization

Kabul, Afghanistan

BY THE NUMBERS: More than 11 orphanages established in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2003
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Andeisha Farid, 28, a former war refugee from Afghanistan. Before launching AFCECO, Farid worked as a program manager for CharityHelp International鈥檚 child-sponsorship program.
WHAT IT DOES: estimates that Afghanistan is home to roughly one million war orphans, many of whom are forced into child labor or a life of begging. Farid, who was educated by Afghan women in a Pakistan refugee camp during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, envisioned a new kind of orphanage, one that would operate with the blessing of home villages by keeping the kids connected to their heritage. After she started her first safe house for 20 kids in Islamabad in 2003, she teamed with CharityHelp International鈥檚 child-sponsorship program, which allowed her to expand. Now AFCECO鈥檚 three-story orphanages鈥攂uilt in places like Kabul and Islamabad鈥攁re oases of learning, where children take classes and participate in soccer, photography, drama, and martial arts. The orphanages harbor more than 600 children, some of whom get a chance to study abroad.
EXTRA CREDIT: Farid鈥檚 locally effective approach is also globally inspiring鈥攁s an example of the dividends that can accrue from a single salvaged life.
LOOKING AHEAD: AFCECO is raising money for a medical clinic in Kabul that would offer care to both orphans and orphanage employees, many of whom are war widows.
听

Foundation Rwanda

New York City

Jean-Paul

Jean-Paul assembling a Kona Africa bike

Assembling bikes

Foundation Rwanda mothers assembling Kona Africa bikes to give to other Foundation Rwanda families in need

BY THE NUMBERS: More than 830 children of rape survivors have been educated through sponsorships since 2008.
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Jules Shell, 34, a documentary filmmaker and former creative 颅director at the Andrea and Charles Bronf颅man Philanthropies
WHAT IT DOES: In 2006, while on assignment in Rwanda, Newsweek photo颅journalist Jonathan Torgovnik met Margaret, a woman who had not only survived the 1994 Rwandan genocide and weathered multiple rapes but also contracted HIV, given birth to a child, and been marginalized by her community. 颅Torgovnik later returned to 颅produce a book of photographs and, with Shell, a film about the estimated 20,000 Rwandan children conceived through sexual assaults. They established Foundation Rwanda to pay for the 颅children鈥檚 education and provide medical services and job training for their 颅mothers. These days, the 颅foundation spends about $283,000 颅annually on programs. Other initiatives include an oral-health project that offers checkups and dental products, and the Ladies of Abasangiye, a cooperative that trains women in business, 颅English-language, and craft skills. (Upscale retailer Anthropologie recently began importing its handbags.)
EXTRA CREDIT: A triple play of tactics鈥攕mart use of media, solid tools, and sound business practices鈥攂oosts a marginalized but extremely deserving class of recipients.
LOOKING AHEAD: Foundation Rwanda has announced plans to launch BirthdayBike.org, a program that raises money to buy a bike and a year鈥檚 schooling for Rwandan schoolkids.
听

Environmental Defense Fund

New York City

BY THE NUMBERS: Four million acres of private land are now protected under the group鈥檚 Safe Harbor program, which helps landowners preserve endangered-species habitat on their property.
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Fred Krupp, 57, former head of the Connecticut Fund for the 颅Environment
WHAT IT DOES: In the 1960s, widespread use of the pesticide DDT threatened the survival of countless American bird species, and a small group came up with a solution that, back then, was strikingly novel: sue the government. The result was a landmark court case that led to statewide and nationwide bans of DDT and, in 1967, to the establishment of the (EDF). The nonprofit continues to pursue unusual tactics, hiring not only scientists and lawyers but also economists and political strategists to devise market-based solutions to broad environmental issues, including climate, oceans, ecosystems, and human health. In the nineties, EDF pioneered corporate partnerships, and their consulting resulted in major corporate changes, such as reducing McDonald鈥檚 waste stream by 30 percent and introducing hybrid trucks to FedEx鈥檚 fleet. Last year, EDF spent more than $83.5 million on programs like Climate Corps, a summer fellowship that trains MBA students to consult with large businesses on energy efficiency.
EXTRA CREDIT: EDF鈥檚 willingness to work with corporate giants like McDonald鈥檚 and Wal-Mart has earned them a reputation for cooperative results.
LOOKING AHEAD: EDF is growing a campaign to pass clean-air legislation at the state and municipal levels, since Congress appears stuck. The organization is also working to quantify the economic benefits afforded by natural systems鈥攆or example, runoff filtration by wetlands鈥攕o decision makers can consider the positive impact in dollars.
听

Trekking for Kids

Washington, D.C.

BY THE NUMBERS: Nearly $400,000 raised for ten orphanages in developing countries since 2005
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Jos茅 Montero, 40, president of the Montero Group, a D.C.鈥揵ased consulting firm
WHAT IT DOES: When siblings Jos茅 and Ana Maria Montero decided to hike the Inca Trail in 2005, they wanted to give something back to the Peruvian community. Their father, Pepe, who鈥檇 lost his parents during the Spanish Civil War, suggested raising money for orphanages, and (TFK) was born. Now the small group鈥攚hich 颅operates mostly with volunteers and an annual budget of about $32,000鈥斅璷rganizes walka颅thon-style treks, bringing money and volunteer labor to remote areas. Each trekker raises a minimum of $1,000 for the chosen orphanage and pays his or her own travel expenses. For two days before the trek, the group completes a project they鈥檝e raised money for, such as building a new dormitory or renovating kitchens. After as many as eight days on the trail, trekkers return and take the orphans on a field trip, like 颅zip-lining, hiking, or visiting a children鈥檚 museum. So far, volunteers have gone to Peru, Nepal, Ecuador, Morocco, 颅Guatemala, Tanzania, and Thailand, raising as much as $60,000 for each orphanage.
EXTRA CREDIT: Combines adventure with purpose-driven travel, and every dollar raised for a project goes to the project
LOOKING AHEAD: Upcoming expeditions include 颅Patagonia and Romania next summer. TFK aims to expand corporate sponsorships to cover 颅administrative expenses and increase the number of trips it offers, with programs geared toward college students, families, and corporate team building.
听

American Rivers

Washington, D.C.

BY THE NUMBERS: 200 dams dismantled since 1998
WHO'S IN CHARGE: CEO and president Bob Irvin, 52, a veteran attorney and environmentalist who most recently served as senior vice president for conservation programs at Defenders of Wildlife
WHAT IT DOES: Rivers are valuable for more than just hydropower: they provide clean drinking water, recreational 颅opportunities, and healthy fisheries. For years, (AR) has pushed these and other arguments in an effort to heal North American waterways, and the group has been at the forefront of two big recent anti-dam victories, both in Washington State. This fall, the 210-foot Glines Canyon Dam became the tallest ever removed, restoring more than 70 miles of salmon and steelhead habitat on the Elwha River. The dismantling of the 125-foot Condit Dam has restored 33 miles of steelhead habitat on the White Salmon River, a renowned whitewater run visited by 25,000 boaters annually. The nonprofit group also lobbies for Wild and Scenic designations鈥攚hich preserve rivers as free-flowing鈥攔eleases an annual most-endangered list to spotlight rivers in peril, and works with municipalities to push measures to prevent polluted urban runoff from reaching watersheds.
EXTRA CREDIT: AR has earned honors from multiple watchdog groups for its efforts to improve river health.
LOOKING AHEAD: American Rivers helped orchestrate the removal of two major dams on Maine鈥檚 Penobscot River. When completed next summer, the effort will restore 1,000 miles of Atlantic salmon runs and 颅canoeing and fishing access. The organization, which spent $8.5 million in 2010, has also helped plan more than 100 dam removals over the next five years.
听

Health in Harmony

Portland, Oregon

BY THE NUMBERS: 14,000 patients treated in 鈥檚 Indonesia clinic since 2007
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Kinari Webb, 39, a graduate of the Yale School of Medicine
WHAT IT DOES: Gunung Palung National Park, a 222,000-acre swath of rainforest in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, harbors one of the last major wild populations of orangutans and other rare species such as gibbons, crested fireback pheasants, and clouded leopards. It鈥檚 also the watershed for 60,000 people who live in poverty on its margins, often engaging in illegal logging. When Webb first visited as an undergrad studying orangutans, she realized that the high cost of medical care for subsistence farmers was what drove them to log the forest for cash. She returned in 2005 to start Health in Harmony and its Indonesian counterpart, Alam Sehat 颅Lestari鈥攂oth of which are driven by the philosophy that better health care for locals could improve the health of the forest. She opened a small medical center in the remote town of Sukadana, a mobile clinic, and an ambulance 颅service, and started several projects to help locals develop sustainable alternative livelihoods as farmers and herders. Though no one is refused care, the clinic offers discounts to communities that agree to stop illegal logging.
EXTRA CREDIT: Health in Harmony is supported by a host of foundations and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Great Apes Conservation Fund; members of the board include professors and doctors from Yale, Dartmouth, and Johns Hopkins.
LOOKING AHEAD: Health in Harmony plans to build a $1.2 million hospital in Sukadana, which will provide surgical care for people who now must travel 12 hours or more to get it.
听

Pathfinder International

Watertown, Massachusetts

BY THE NUMBERS: More than 3.75 million people received HIV and AIDS services through Pathfinder-supported projects in 2010
WHO'S IN CHARGE: In February, Purnima Mane will take over as president, replacing longtime leader Daniel E. Pellegrom. Mane is currently the assistant secretary general of the United Nations.
WHAT IT DOES: Overpopulation can lead to poverty and conflict and can overtax water supplies, arable land, and other resources. was founded in 1957 to expand access to basic health and reproductive services so individuals in developing 颅nations can plan families and build sustainable communities. With $90 million to spend each year, the organization reaches people in more than 25 countries with a range of local programs. In the past two years, these have included establishing a solar-powered blood bank in Nigeria, distributing delivery kits with medication for rural births in Bangladesh, and training Red Cross staffers to prevent postpartum hemorrhages in refugee settings in Tanzania. Through a project in Bihar, India, Pathfinder helped educate more than 650,000 youth in 700 villages about contraceptives. The program resulted in an average 2.6-year increase in the age of marriage and a 1.5-year increase in the age of mothers at first birth.
EXTRA CREDIT: Pathfinder spends 88 percent of its budget on programs.
LOOKING AHEAD: Recently, the group partnered with the Nature Conservancy and the Frankfurt Zoological Society on a plan to establish sustainable fisheries, healthy forests, and health care in a remote, wildlife-rich area of western Tanzania, where populations are outpacing natural resources.
听

Rainforest Alliance

New York City

BY THE NUMBERS: More than 167 million acres of forests worldwide are now rated as sustainable under Rainforest Alliance鈥檚 certification system
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Tensie Whelan, 51, a former journalist and consultant who has worked with the National Audubon Society and the League of Conservation Voters
WHAT IT DOES: Established during the rainforest crisis of the 1980s, 25-year-old aims to preserve the biodiversity of forests worldwide by creating conservation-friendly livelihoods for locals. Its programs center on sustainability-certification labels for forestry, tourism, and agricultural businesses, which can just as easily be forces for conservation as for devastation. Certification guidelines and training programs help farmers, foresters, lodges, and tour guides build sustainable businesses. The labels are also designed to encourage consumers to purchase conscientiously. (Companies like Newman鈥檚 Own Organics, Naked Juice, and Whole Foods buy Rainforest 颅Alliance鈥揷ertified 颅coffee, cocoa, bananas, and tea.) The organization offers a free grade-school curriculum鈥攄ownloaded and viewed online eight million times since 2003鈥攖o teach kids about the animals and people living in the rainforest.
EXTRA CREDIT: The demand for sustainable goods has never been higher, and Rainforest 颅Alliance鈥揷ertified products sell to companies with major impact, like Dole and Wal-Mart.
LOOKING AHEAD: In 2007, Rainforest Alliance launched a climate-change program, which helps farmers reforest unused lands, and recently raised its standards for sustainable beef production.
听

Technoserve

Washington, D.C.

BY THE NUMBERS: Since 2010, an estimated 40,300 people employed in 30 countries with the help of 鈥檚 programs
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Bruce McNamer, a 49-year-old Stanford MBA, formerly an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, a management consultant at McKinsey, and a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay
WHAT IT DOES: While working in a hospital in Ghana in the 1960s, Technoserve founder Ed Bullard realized that local farms and businesses languished not because of a shortage of moti颅vation or ability, but because of a lack of resources, both educational and financial. He started Technoserve in 1968 to connect entrepreneurs in developing countries with capital and educational resources. The organization started primarily with small farmers, but now, with a $58.3 million annual budget, it works to strengthen entire industries, such as coffee and cocoa. Some 1,000 staffers, mostly natives with successful business experience, train entrepreneurs in skills from writing business plans to apply颅ing fertilizer; connect them to finance organizations and corporations that can purchase their goods; hold business-plan competitions; and lobby to improve regulations. The results can be tangible for beneficiaries like Nicaragua鈥檚 Jorge Salazar Cooperative of farmers, which, with Technoserve鈥檚 help, started planting high-value crops like rare criollo cocoa and built a plant for processing malanga, a local tuber. The co-op then reinvested its profits to build a pharmacy and support local schools and police.
EXTRA CREDIT: Technoserve enlists volunteer consultants from companies like McKinsey and L鈥橭r茅al. It鈥檚 top-rated by the American Institute of Philanthropy.
LOOKING AHEAD: Techno颅serve recently received a grant from the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund to help develop Haiti鈥檚 business sector along with initiatives like the Haiti Hope Project, a partnership with Coca-Cola to help mango farmers find new markets and financial backing.
听

Vital Voices Global Partnership

Washington, D.C.

BY THE NUMBERS: 10,000 emerging women leaders trained in 127 countries since 1997
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Alyse Nelson, 37, former deputy 颅director of the Vital Voices Global Democracy Initiative at the U.S. Department of State
WHAT IT DOES: This NGO sprang from an acclaimed U.S. State Department program, 颅Vital Voices Democracy Initiative, established in 1997 by Hillary Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Working with the UN, EU, World Bank, and international governments, the program organized conferences for hundreds of emerging women leaders. In 2000, (VVGP) was established to continue the mission by combating human trafficking, supporting women entrepreneurs, and advancing women in politics and public leadership. The goal is for each woman touched by VVGP鈥檚 颅programs to pay it forward. In 2008, Ghanaian Brigitte 颅Dzogbenuku, general manager of a fitness center in Accra, spent five weeks in the U.S. taking skills seminars and shadowing Donna Orender, president of the WNBA. After returning to Ghana, she founded Hoop Sistas, a girls鈥� basketball program that offers career development and women鈥檚 health workshops.
EXTRA CREDIT: Big reach with steady 颅results; consistently receives four-star 颅ratings from Charity Navigator
LOOKING AHEAD: In 2012, VVGP will expand programs in North Africa and the Middle East.
听

World Wildlife Fund

Washington, D.C.

BY THE NUMBERS: More than $1 billion invested in roughly 12,000 projects in 100 countries since 1985
WHO'S IN CHARGE: Carter Roberts, 51, a Harvard MBA who spent 15 years leading domestic, international, and science programs at the Nature Conservancy
WHAT IT DOES: The (WWF) was founded in 1961 with a deceptively simple mission: to conserve species. It soon realized that in order to do that, it needed to preserve the land and oceans those species live in鈥攁nd that triage was in order. Over the years, the organization has homed in on 19 hot spots of biodiversity experiencing grave threats, such as the Amazon, the eastern Himalayas, and the Arctic. Now operating out of 100 offices worldwide, WWF employs a strategy heavy on fieldwork and scientific studies, which staffers use both to develop solutions at the village level and to affect policies and consumer behavior. One solution WWF pioneered: sustainable-business certifications that encourage better business practices and informed purchasing among consumers.
EXTRA CREDIT: WWF鈥檚 name recognition and budget allow it to implement projects and initiatives that cross political borders and incorporate dozens of complicated partnerships, a difficult feat for smaller groups.
LOOKING AHEAD: Through its Market Transformation Initiative, WWF is working with about 100 multinational corporations鈥�50 partnerships are already established鈥攖hat provide staples like soy, beef, and sugar. The idea is to help companies institute sustainable practices on all levels, from harvesting to packaging. Critics decry WWF for sleeping with the enemy鈥攖he organization takes consulting fees鈥攂ut its success is undeniable. In the past four years, with WWF鈥檚 help, Coca-Cola has improved water efficiency by 13 percent and reduced carbon emissions by 6 percent.

David Belt

Bright idea: New-school urban playgrounds

In July 2009, in a blighted junkyard along the borough鈥檚 Gowanus Canal, a tree grew in Brooklyn鈥攁ctually, a tree, a bocce court, lounge chairs, and three swimming pools made from converted dumpsters. For the next two months, this lo-fi country club hosted barbecues, birthdays, and mixers, offering locals a taste of leisure life inside the hardscrabble city.

The project, called Dumpster Pools, was the work of David Belt, a 44-year-old real estate developer who grew restless a few years ago and decided to chart a new course. To that end, he began turning what he calls 鈥渏unk spaces鈥濃�攁bandoned big-box stores, run-down urban lots鈥攊nto inspired community rec centers and art projects. In May 2010, Belt and his 颅colleagues at 鈥攁 rotating crew of like-minded friends and designers鈥攖ook on the 鈥渂oring act of recycling,鈥� as Belt puts it, by building a 20-by-30-foot clear box, with high walls made of steel and bulletproof glass, on a private Brooklyn lot. Locals were invited to smash bottles against the glass, which was wired to trigger nightclub-style flashing lights. The shards were all recycled.

Both projects were funded entirely by donations and built mostly by volunteers. In 2012, Belt is expanding, with new projects in Philadelphia (where he refurbished 27,000 square feet of an old warehouse and church as a rec-and-learning center) and Detroit (an industrial-wasteland skate park). The coolest of Macro Sea鈥檚 future visions: a series of five-story artificial ice cliffs for urban mountaineering, which Belt hopes to bring to Manhattan high-rises someday. The challenge is finding ice coils large enough to keep the walls solid for weeks at a time, but Belt doesn鈥檛 seem worried. 鈥淲e鈥檙e not afraid of scale,鈥� he laughs.

Amy Purdy

Bright idea: Disabled adventurers go big

Purdy is one of the country鈥檚 most effective advocates for disabled outdoor athletes, and she came to her work the hard way: by losing both legs below the knees when she was 19. In the summer of 1999, bacterial meningitis sent her body into septic shock and set off a cascading series of 颅organ failures that nearly killed her. A week before, she鈥檇 been a rising young snowboard competitor; suddenly, it looked like her career was over.

鈥淚 was lying in my hospital bed, watching the X Games on TV,鈥� Purdy says, 鈥渁nd I remember thinking that if I could see just one person competing with a prosthetic leg, everything would be OK.鈥� There weren鈥檛 any, but working with a prosthetics expert, Purdy created a leg with an articulated ankle joint that allowed her to bend her knees on a board. Within a year and a half, she was competing again. Since then she鈥檚 won three gold medals in adaptive events, most recently at the New Zealand Para-Snowboard World Cup.

In 2005, Purdy and her boyfriend, Daniel Gale, founded (AAS) to give other disabled athletes a path into extreme activities鈥攆rom motocross to snowboarding to skateboarding. In addition to taking wounded veterans onto the slopes and halfpipe, AAS has created a competitive circuit for disabled riders and hopes to bring boardercross to the Paralympics by 2018. 鈥淲hen I lost my legs, there were no 颅opportunities to move forward in snowboarding,鈥� she says. Now, thanks in part to Purdy, there are 81 adaptive snowboarders competing around the world.

Jon Rose

Bright idea: DIY disaster relief

In September 2009, California surfer Jon Rose was sailing toward the island of Sumatra, carrying ten water filters that he planned to deliver to a rural community while enjoying a surf trip in Indonesia. Rose was looking to move on from his career as a Quiksilver-sponsored surfing pro. Inspired by his father鈥檚 nonprofit, RainCatcher, which teaches African villagers how to filter rainwater, he hit upon the idea of recruiting surfers to deliver water filters in their travels through developing countries. He thought it would be a pet project. Then, on his first mission, an earthquake hit nearby, devastating the city of Padang. 鈥淚t was like divine intervention,鈥� Rose says. 鈥淟ike, 鈥極K, this is your life. This is what you鈥檙e doing.鈥欌�夆��

Rose鈥檚 organization, , has since provided some 2.5 million people access to safe water, delivering more than 75,000 simple portable filters, which can be used with local water supplies and whatever buckets are at hand, cutting out the need to dig wells or use purification chemicals. The group is one part viral campaign鈥攍ooking for volunteers to buy and distribute filters abroad鈥攁nd one part action squad, running relief and improvement programs in Haiti, Brazil, Pakistan, Indonesia, Kenya, Uganda, India, and Liberia. It鈥檚 a style that Rose refers to as 鈥渂lack ops鈥� or 鈥済uerrilla humanitarianism,鈥� which he defines as working 鈥渦nder the radar and around the red tape.鈥� That means a lean budget and a skeleton staff that coordinates with locals on the ground and moves into and out of target areas quickly.

Those years he spent far off the beaten path prepared him for his new job, Rose says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 sort of the same way I felt about surfing as a kid,鈥� he says. 鈥淏ut it鈥檚 greater.鈥�

David Milarch

Organization: Archangel Ancient Tree Archive
Bright idea: New old growth

David Milarch discovered his calling as a tree evangelist during a near-death experience from renal failure 19 years ago. 鈥淲hen I came to, there was a ten-page outline that I don鈥檛 remember writing,鈥� says the cofounder of this Michigan-based environmental group. His mission, dictated (he sincerely believes) by the Archangel Michael: to clean up the planet鈥檚 air and water and reverse the effects of climate change by cloning the world鈥檚 biggest, oldest trees.

Once a hard-living biker, Milarch developed a passionate spiritual connection to old-growth trees鈥攅specially redwoods and giant sequoias. Both species can live for millennia, pumping out oxygen and sequestering tons of atmospheric carbon. Milarch, along with his son Jared and project coordinator Meryl Marsh, started taking cuttings from the tops of the most titanic redwoods and sequoias they could find, as well as sprouts from huge stumps. Working in a Monterey, California, greenhouse and using various propagation techniques, project consultant Bill Werner has coaxed bits of the plant tissue to root and grow into field-ready transplants. also maintains living libraries of more than 40 cloned species, from an ancient Monterey cypress to thousand-year-old Irish oaks.

Some scientists have questioned whether genetic material alone is responsible for the trees鈥� size and longevity, arguing that favorable growing conditions could just as likely explain it, but Milarch sides with his science adviser, the eminent redwood geneticist William J. Libby. Next year, Milarch hopes to start planting redwood saplings in San Francisco鈥檚 Golden Gate Park, and he鈥檚 looking for investors to underwrite other planting projects in the U.S. and abroad. 鈥淲e want to rebuild the world鈥檚 first old-growth redwood forest,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e the most iconic trees on earth.鈥�

Dan Morrison

Organization: Citizen Effect
Bright idea: Donations with destinations

Dan Morrison understands the power of face time. While traveling through India in 2006, he met a woman who said her earthquake-ravaged community needed a well but didn鈥檛 have the $5,000 required to build it. Back home in Washington, D.C., he sent out a card pledging $2,500 and asking acquaintances to join him. Within days, $500 checks started 颅arriving鈥攆rom a friend, a former roommate, and Morrison鈥檚 high school English teacher, among others. A lightbulb went off. 鈥淚 realized that with fundraising, it鈥檚 critical to have a specific project people can wrap their minds around,鈥� says Morrison. 鈥淭hat the request was coming from someone they knew made it that much more effective.鈥�

In December 2008, Morrison created 1Well, a nonprofit that helped people make investments in high-need areas around the world. Soon after, he quit his job as a consultant on Middle East policy to focus on 1Well full-time. In 2009, spurred by a $300,000 grant from Google鈥檚 executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, and his wife, Wendy, the group morphed into , an online fundraising platform that connects citizen philanthropists with vetted, small-scale projects around the world. Budding do-gooders visit the website and choose a country, a fundraising goal, and a focus area (food security, education). In 2011, the group raised close to $500,000, funding 339 projects to date.

The twist comes in picking a fundraising approach鈥攍ike the cross-country bike ride that Boulder, Colorado鈥檚 Glenn Olsen did to raise money to build indoor toilets in Bandwhad, India. 鈥淲hen you do what you love in the name of a good cause, it鈥檚 more fun for everyone,鈥� says Morrison, who believes that many people who might skip a specific objective (eliminating dysentery in South Asia?) will be lured in by an individual putting forth so much effort to help.

How We Picked Them

To compile our list of top philanthropies, we polled everyone from fellow journalists to independent experts who keep track of nonprofits all over the world, and we used Facebook and Twitter to broadcast our interest. We also brought in Kate Siber, a tireless Colorado-based writer who spent weeks beating the bushes for capable nonprofits that are doing work that is both worthwhile and innovative. Siber relied on ratings from organizations like Charity Navigator and Charitywatch, but she also looked to other credibility factors, including partnerships with government agencies and NGOs, transparency (does the organization clearly spell out its mission and the results it鈥檚 achieved?), 颅efficiency (how much is spent on programs instead of overhead?), and scope. Your favorites aren鈥檛 on the list? Tell us all about them at fixtheworld@outsidemag.com. It鈥檚 a big planet out there. No doubt we鈥檒l be doing this again.

Do Diligence

How to size up charities on your own

There are 1.6 million nonprofits in the U.S., but only a small number are rated by groups like Charity Navigator () and the National Center for Charitable Statistics (). Interested in one that hasn’t been vetted by either? Do your homework using their methods.
Check financial health. Efficient charities spend at least 75 percent of their annual budget directly on programs, according to Charity Navigator. An organization should be able to provide recent 990 forms鈥攁n annual report to the IRS, required of most nonprofits, describing their mission and finances鈥攐nline or upon request.
Assess executive compensation. You don’t want to spend too much on somebody else’s salary. Be aware that average executive pay for the largest 5,500 organizations is $150,000, but highly effective organizations may spend more for a seasoned CEO.
Consider reputation. Grants from well-known groups, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or contracts with government agencies lend organizations credibility, since they require detailed vetting. Do a search of the organization on Google News for any red flags.
Request the organization’s policy on donor relationships. Most will agree not to sell your contact information to other groups or will offer you the opportunity to opt out.
Investigate results. Established charities should be able to demonstrate the need for their services, report their activities, measure their results, and communicate all of it clearly. If the group is small and local, observe projects in your area.

The post Citizen Philanthropy appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Will we ever see a 1080 on a skateboard?
In the last two years, our prediction came true: Tom Schaar, a 12-year-old American completed the 1080.

Probably, and it may happen soon. The move鈥攖hree full aerial rotations鈥攊s a daunting combination of force and balletics, requiring a rider to jump off a ramp, spin extremely quickly, then descend a vertical wall, abruptly breaking rotational momentum. Skate master Tony Hawk has said that Shaun White is, for now, the only contender. He should know: at the 1999 X Games, Hawk completed the first 900-degree spin on a skateboard鈥攖wo and a half aerial rotations鈥攁fter 13 years of practice.

Why White? For one, he’s nailed the 1080 on snow, perfecting the move’s motion with his feet strapped to a board that won’t fly off upon landing. The experience has helped him figure out the speed he needs at takeoff to maximize spin. “Shaun has a very good feel for decreasing his moment of inertia,” says James Riordon, a skater, engineer, and spokesman for the American Physical Society, the country’s largest organization of physicists. Moment of inertia, he explains, measures an object’s resistance to rotation. White’s size may help, too: since he’s only five foot seven, he can tuck into a ball鈥攖he shape that maximizes spinning speed鈥攎ore quickly than, say, Hawk, who’s six foot two.

Still, according to Riordon, three rotations is at least ten times more difficult than two and a half. That hasn’t deterred White, who tried the move 29 times at the 2005 X Games, occasionally completing the 2.5-second rotation only to fall upon landing. “I’d love to land this 1080,” he’s told an interviewer. “And I think I can.”

What’s the longest possible open-water swim?

First you have to define what constitutes a swim. Most experts, including cold-water distance swimmers Lynne Cox, 54, and Lewis Gordon Pugh, 41, play by English Channel (EC) rules, which require you to start and end on land, allow the use of a swim cap, goggles, and a bathing suit (but no wetsuit, flippers, or shark cage), and permit a boat crew to feed and hydrate you. But you can’t rest by hanging off the side of a craft or sleeping on it, a luxury that some distance swimmers allow themselves.

Indeed, sleep deprivation might be the biggest barrier. The longest known duration for an open-water swim is Canadian Vicki Keith’s two-way crossing of Lake Ontario in 1987, a distance of 64.6 miles that took her 56 hours and 10 minutes. Diana Nyad holds the title for pure distance, with her 102.5-mile swim from North Bimini, Bahamas, to Juno Beach, Florida, in 1972. But Tim Johnson, author of History of Open-Water Marathon Swimming, says a fast current gave Nyad a major boost. Using EC rules, he says, “we’re not going to see anything much longer than 60 miles unless you’re utilizing currents.”

Swimmers Jon Erikson, Philip Rush, and Alison Streeter are the only people to complete a three-way crossing of the English Channel, a 63-mile haul. Is anyone crazy enough to go for four? “I wouldn’t even want to be on the boat to witness that kind of suffering,” says Johnson.

When will somebody run a marathon in less than two hours?

No runner has broken the two-hour mark, but the old record of Gebrselassie has been smashed. In September 2011, Kenya’s Patrick Makau ran a 2:03:38 on the streets of Berlin. The next best time was set by Kenya’s Wilson Kupsang at Frankfurt in 2011.

Ethiopia’s Haile “Geb” Gebrselassie ran the fastest marathon ever (2:03:59) in September 2008 on the sunny streets of Berlin. (Eight of the ten fastest marathons have been run in Berlin or Rotterdam, home to flat, low-altitude courses.) Since then, nobody’s come close to beating that time鈥攖he next best is a 2:04:27 run by Kenya’s Duncan Kipkemboi Kibet at Rotterdam in 2009鈥攁nd most experts think it will be a while. Running a marathon four minutes faster would require putting down 26 con-se颅cutive four-and-a-half-minute miles鈥攁 feat that “will not be achieved in my lifetime by an athlete who is clean and not genetically modified,” says Timothy Noakes, a sports-science professor at the University of Cape Town and the author of Lore of Running.

Elite runners tend to perfect their 10,000-meter time before advancing to marathons, and a fast 6.2 miles on a track often translates to a fast 26.2. (It’s no coincidence that Geb held the world record in the 10,000 until 2005.) Once an athlete can run that distance 30 to 45 seconds faster than Geb’s time, he might have a shot at a sub-two-hour marathon. But Noakes thinks it’s “biologically impossible for the foreseeable future.”

It took Kenenisa Bekele, another Ethiopian, seven years to take five seconds off Geb’s 26:22:75 record in the 10,000. If this trend continues, 29 to 50 years will pass before the necessary track times are achieved and another few before a sub-two marathon time is recorded. Still, there’s hope. “I truly believe it will happen,” says running coach and former Olympian Jeff Galloway. “The human spirit is programmed to keep pushing.” At 65, however, Galloway, like Noakes, doesn’t believe he’ll be around to witness it.

*In April 2011, Kenyan Geoffrey Mutai, 29, ran the Boston Marathon in 2:03:02. His time receives an asterisk due to the point-to-point nature of the run.

How deep can a human freedive in the ocean and live?

Around 500 feet … at least that’s what Austrian freediver Herbert Nitsch was told ten years ago, when most people believed that diving deeper meant certain death due to nitrogen narcosis, oxygen toxicity, and the paralyzing effects of decompression sickness (the bends). Since then, however, that mark has been smashed many times, and Nitsch, 41, has become the “deepest man on earth” by plunging to 702 feet鈥攁bout 70 stories鈥攂eneath the ocean’s surface on a single breath. In November he plans to go a lot lower, attempting a “no limits” dive to a staggering 1,000 feet.

Freediving can be a confusing sport, since there are numerous genres, including no-limits (which permits any means necessary to achieve depth, from weights to watersleds) and unassisted (just you and your straight-down swimming stroke). Even in the unassisted style, old assumptions have been cast aside. Last December, New Zealand’s William Trubridge鈥攖he current unassisted record holder鈥攎ade it down to 328 feet in the Bahamas, surviving water pressure that reduced his lungs to the size of oranges.

The risks are compounded for no-limits divers. Before Nitsch, the two male divers to attempt 500-foot-plus no-limits dives鈥擝enjamin Franz and Carlos Coste鈥攅nded up paralyzed for years. (Franz still hasn’t fully recovered.) The former female record holder, Audrey Mestre, passed out and drowned in 2002 during a 561-foot attempt. Somehow, Nitsch doesn’t seem fazed. “If you think about what is impossible tomorrow,” he says, “the day after tomorrow you laugh about it.”

How much higher can these waterfall-plunging kayakers go?

In 2007, paddler Dan West, then an undergraduate at Oregon’s Lewis and Clark College, examined this question in a report called (what else?) “The Physics of Kayaking Down Waterfalls.” Kayak durability isn’t an issue鈥攜ou could drop today’s polyethylene boats from 1,000 feet鈥攂ut human durability is. West crunched the numbers by kayaking small waterfalls with an accelerometer, which measures G-forces, and plugging his findings into physics formulas. Based on this, he figured the limit might be around 186 feet, a mark that was matched in 2009 when Tyler Bradt paddled off Washington State’s 189.5-foot Palouse Falls and walked away with only a sprained wrist.

Still, West probably wasn’t far off, judging by what happens to people who jump off the 245-foot Golden Gate Bridge to commit suicide. They hit the water at approximately 85.5 miles per hour, a jolt that can smash internal organs, break bones, and sever the aorta. Kayakers have one advantage over jumpers鈥攖hey hit bow first, in pools aerated by waterfalls鈥攂ut a cushion of bubbles can soften the blow only so much.

Will people keep pushing this crazy record? Bradt, who was likely going 75 when he landed at Palouse, thinks he’s probably finished. “I’d have to have a lot of motivation to do something bigger,” he says. Meanwhile, Rush Sturges, a top paddler who filmed Bradt’s descent, predicts that someone will try a 200-foot waterfall within two years. (One likely candidate is Igua莽煤 Falls, on the border of Brazil and Argentina, which has several drops over 200 feet.) West thinks kayakers should seek out other thrills. “Somebody is going to get seriously hurt,” he says.

Is a 110 mile-per-hour fastball possible?

Last September, Cincinnati Reds flamethrower Aroldis Chapman hurled a 105.1-mile-per-hour pill past Tony Gwynn Jr., of the San Diego Padres, whipping the sports world into a frenzy. Was this the fastest pitch ever? And could the mark keep going up?

The first question is hard to answer because it comes down to trusting measurement technologies from the past. Before Chapman came along, the previous, unofficial record belonged to Joel Zumaya (104.8 in 2006), but there are old and unlikely claims that Nolan Ryan threw 108.1 in 1974 (as measured by Doppler laser radar) and that Bob Feller fired a 107.6 in 1946 (as measured by antiquated military equipment).

As for the second question, experts doubt we’ll see any Usain Bolt鈥搇ike quantum leaps. “Chapman is at the upper limits of what’s possible,” says Glenn Fleisig, research director at the American Sports Medicine Institute in Birmingham, Alabama, which studies the biomechanics of pitching. Why? Hurling a ball that fast strains the body’s connective tissue to the breaking point. When a 200-pound pitcher throwing 100 mph releases the ball, the force on his shoulder is equivalent to a 200-plus-pound man trying to yank his arm out of its socket. Fastball throwing can injure the shoulder joint and the elbow’s ulnar collateral (or Tommy John) ligament. While pitchers can strengthen their muscles and improve their mechanics, there isn’t much that can be done to improve ligaments and tendons鈥攂arring, of course, a sudden miracle of evolution or (more likely) cyborg surgical techniques that haven’t been invented yet.

The post The Outer Limits of Human Performance appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

IT’S SNOWING AS we pull our van onto a muddy turnoff on a two-lane coastal highway. With a gloved hand, Pat Millin wipes fog from the passenger-side window and studies the rugged shoreline of the Lofoten Islands, the southern portion of a remote archipelago in northwestern Norway. On the horizon, a storm is pitching 20-knot winds across a gray and tattered ocean. Fifty yards below us, waves lurch and fizzle against the black rocks of the bay’s breakwater.

Surfer Pat Millin

Pat Millin surfing the Lofoten Islands

Map of Norway

Surfer Matt Whitehead

Aussie surfer Matt Whitehead

Surfer Christian Wach

California surfer Christian Wach

Arctic surfing, Norway

A team member picking his way toward a spot the group christened Glacier Bay

Svartisen glacier, Norway

Like ice: Svartisen, Norway's second-largest glacier

Surfer Christian Wach

Wach on the beach at Broken Hearts

“That’s surfable,” declares Millin, a 22-year-old pro surfer from San Diego. He pulls a wool cap down over his ears, takes a deep breath, and throws the door open. Through the whistle and thump of freezing wind, I can hear him yell, “I’m going in!”

The ocean doesn’t look even vaguely surfable. Millin knows it, but after ten straight hours of creeping over ice-covered roads with our photographer and expedition leader, Yassine Ouhilal, we’re desperate. We didn’t travel 5,000 miles to sit in a van and drink $7 cups of carry-out coffee (the going rate in Norway). We came to surf above the Arctic Circle.

A few minutes later, Millin and I are outside, shivering naked as we try to push bare feet into snow-flecked wetsuits. “This is stupid,” I protest through chattering teeth. “Too late now,” Millin smiles. Then he grabs his board, jogs off toward the exploding ocean, and dives in. I wade in behind him, jolted by the electric sting of 40-degree water seeping onto my skin. I watch as Millin drifts south toward the mouth of a 30-story fjord, his torso bobbing on the monochrome horizon. As we fight the current, I can feel the pull to open sea.

“Let’s go back!” I shout. Millin nods. Since we got out here, the winds have picked up and the snow has turned to M&M-size balls of hail. We can’t even see the shore.

Millin turns and paddles into the rumpled face of a wave, stands, and rides to the inside of a submerged reef before disappearing up the breakwater. I try to follow, but I’m swallowed by an errant wave and thrown into whitewash. We slosh out and run through snow back to the van, both of us with ice-cream headaches and brick-numb feet and hands. Key in ignition, heater full blast, a wrap of a blanket, an exhale, and a rev of the engine and we’re back on the road to another beach.

“There are some world-class waves along here,” says Ouhilal, who stood by the van and took pictures. “We just need to keep searching.” Through the passenger window, I watch as the ocean disappears in a static of snow. Like a TV screen losing its signal, it slowly fades and then it’s gone.

WE AREN’T MASOCHISTS, and we didn’t come to Norway just to be cold and miserable. We were drawn to these coasts, at 68 degrees north, to hunt for what could be the most perfect, undiscovered cold-water breaks on earth.

Ouhilal, a 32-year-old surfer and photographer based in Nova Scotia, learned about them three years ago, during his first expedition to the Lofotens. The pictures he brought back revealed a kind of tropical paradise in reverse, where warm sand was replaced by snow, crowded piers by ice shelves, and ribboned, ten-foot waves broke beneath an otherworldly curtain of aurora borealis. It looked like Hawaii stuffed into a freezer.

Our plan was to scout a few Lofoten breaks, head north into the unsurfed territory in Troms County, and then, if time allowed, explore the coast of Russia. (We eventually made it to Russia but weren’t allowed to surf; as we found out, most of the country’s northwestern Arctic coast is off-limits to anyone not in the military.)

Though swell charts for Norway showed that wintertime produced the biggest waves, it seemed suicidal to try surfing there during the darkest, coldest Arctic days. So we decided to go in early spring, when swell activity was still strong (albeit inconsistent), days were longer, and temperatures were, by Arctic standards, bearable: between 20 and 45 degrees Fahrenheit. Last April, heading out from various points of origin, we packed long johns, wool socks, ChapStick, and 30 pounds of cold-water surf gear into our bags and headed north. Way north.

Flying in to the Lofotens from mainland Norway is reminiscent of the prelude to Fantasy Island: There you are in the backseat of a prop plane, plunging through low-hanging clouds, between mountaintops, and over gaping bays of translucent-blue water. Through the tiny window, the spiky volcanic peaks of the surrounding fjords look like an EKG readout against the horizon. There’s a clunk on the frozen runway and minutes later you’re standing in the snow with a surfboard under your arm, wondering if this all isn’t a terrible idea.

At least that’s how I felt after Ouhilal picked me up at the airport and we took a bayside road to a cluster of 150-year-old converted fishermen’s shacks set on wooden stilts above bay water in the village of Ballstad. This 700-person town sits on the island of Vestv氓g酶y, the center of five principal Lofoten islands that hug the coast of Norway like an open parenthesis. These cabins would serve as our base camp for the next few weeks.

THAT NIGHT, around a worn table in an adjacent lodge, I met the other members of our crew. To my right was Millin. Next to him was mop-haired Christian Wach, 20, a professional longboarder from San Clemente who last year was named by Surfer magazine as one of the top 100 young surfers in the world. Sitting across from them was Matt Whitehead, a dreadlocked 29-year-old vegan soul surfer who literally lives under a bush outside Byron Bay, on the east coast of Australia. While a group of fishermen drank beer and stared at us from the high chairs of a bar, we pored over a map and plotted our month-long course.

@#95;box photo=image_2 alt=image_2_alt@#95;box

Ouhilal wasn’t the first person to try surfing here. Forty years ago, a local character named Thor, inspired by the cover of a Beach Boys album, built a foam-and-resin surfboard and paddled out from the fishing bay of Unstad, along the western coast of Vestv氓g酶y. For years he surfed, mostly alone, during the long, temperate, and small-wave days of summer. In 2007, photographs of Unstad’s enormous winter waves started hitting the international surf radar, and interest grew in Norway and beyond. A dozen locals bought surfboards and six-millimeter wetsuits and began exploring this wonder in their backyard. Before long, they were hooked. Here was a heaving point break that threw a 100-yard-wide, double-overhead tube across a reef and into the white-sand bottom of the bay. And nobody was on it.

Millin had surfed Unstad in 2007 and claimed it was his new favorite wave but very unreliable. A Rip Curl team found that out the hard way in April 2008. For two weeks, the group sat in their fishing cabins, shivered in the sleet, ate cod soup, and waited for the waves to come. They came, but only at the end of a very long wait. Norway, they said, was too fickle to surf; worse, it was freezing.

That may be true, but we’d come to find out for ourselves. To keep us warm on land, we brought base layers and down jackets supplied by Eddie Bauer First Ascent, which sponsored the trip. To survive in the water, we used the warmest wetsuits we could get. Ten years ago, spending hours surfing in 30-to-40-degree ocean water wouldn’t have been feasible. Old-school wetsuits, made with thick layers of synthetic neoprene, were cumbersome and leaky. If they were built thick enough to keep you warm in the coldest conditions, they were too constricting to allow a full range of movement. In recent years, design improvements in neoprene and the mass-market availability of products like geoprene a wetsuit material, made from limestone, that’s more water-impermeable than neoprene at half the thickness have changed the game.

That doesn’t mean it feels good. Your exposed face still stings, your head throbs after each dunk, and your toes and fingers go numb after about 30 minutes, no matter how thick your gloves and boots are. You have to want it. But why would you?

“I guess it’s the isolation. That’s why I wanted to come back here,” said Millin, slurping down a cod tongue at the lodge, grimacing, then slurping another. “How many people are surfing in Hawaii right now? How many thousands?”

Wach nodded and took a sip of beer. “The coldness, the snow you know, it feels purifying,” he said. “And to think you can be out somewhere alone, surfing on this sick beach. There are so few places on earth you can do that today.”

THE NEXT MORNING at 6:30, we loaded our boards in the van for our first trip out. “Cod jerky, anyone?” Millin asked as he cued up a techno song on the stereo.

“Meat is murder, mate,” Whitehead said. “And this crap music is murdering my ears. Turn it down.” Millin playfully turned it up and jammed a handful of salty dried fish into his mouth. Meanwhile, Ouhilal kept his eyes on the ice-covered road, which he traveled at more than twice the speed limit, determined to make the outgoing tide.

I couldn’t help but think that we were all going on a blind date arranged on the Internet. The satellite images, logistics, and statistics printed from the Web and crammed inside a manila folder on the van’s dashboard provided a stunning data portrait of our destination, but those things meant nothing until we actually got a feel for the place. That’s what had attracted Millin, Wach, and the rest of us to this snow-globe landscape: the nervous, giddy feeling of expectation, of finding some icy Waimea here in surfing’s last frontier.

Waimea it wasn’t. During our first week, we surfed microscopic, wind-blown shore breaks along the Lofotens’ central-western coast. For a few days, the weather was so bad we stayed inside and played guitars and drums we’d borrowed from a local death-metal band. The next week, we hiked three miles across a fjord to camp on the frozen sand of a crescent bay. It was so cold that residual water in Millin’s ear crystallized overnight and expanded in his ear canal. He woke up yelling, holding his head over the fire to try and melt it out. On the two-hour hike through blizzard conditions back to our boat, I swore I could hear the sound of Odin’s voice through the whipping wind, saying, “Go back to California, fools.”

Yes, there were dozens of perfectly set-up beaches in Norway. Yes, it was the most stunning place we’d ever seen. But after two weeks and a thousand miles of searching, a cold reality was setting in: The waves sucked. Inclement weather seemed nearly constant, and on most days, gale-force winds and random sleet and snowstorms churned the ocean into a frothy mess. Through it all, we’d managed only a handful of sad sessions. On our twelfth night in the Lofotens, we gathered around our table, ate our nightly meal of cod, and debated a new plan of attack.

A local map showed a place called Senja, an island north of the Lofotens that looked promising. There, in Troms County, the fingers of fjords jut into the Norwegian Sea and protect the shores from northern wind. Up there, we’d simply have to find surfable waves. And, unlike in the Lofotens, most of the coast in Troms is accessible from a state highway, which would let us stay in constant view of the ocean. When the swell turned on, we’d pull over, suit up, and jump in. Based on Ouhilal’s research, it appeared that nobody had surfed Senja before. We left that night.

To our surprise, we found that even in April much of the Troms highway is banked by five-foot walls of snow. When there aren’t snowbanks, there are tunnels, and traveling along this road makes you feel like you’re being pushed through a series of pneumatic tubes. The windows of the van flashed with blue and white, displaying, at one moment, a white wall of snow and, the next, impossibly stunning fjord peaks, neon-blue skies, or another perfect beach…tons and tons of beaches.

“My God, I think we found what we were looking for,” Ouhilal said as we passed yet another setup. “This place is a goldmine.”

After 12 hours, we reached the northwestern end of Senja, near the village of Hamn. We pulled over around 3 P.M. and gazed at a crystal-clear bay, where a corduroy of tiny, perfectly formed waves rolled in, arched their backs in blue waters, and crumbled in white lines on the shore. On the beach, the tide lines of the last storm swell were still frozen in the sand. By measuring wave lines, Ouhilal was able to calculate that five-foot waves had broken on this beach, probably just days before.

“This place could be amazing,” said Whitehead, pushing his blond dreadlocks from his eyes as he stared out at the ocean. Around the fjord, another perfect setup revealed itself on the next beach, and the next. After a while we stopped counting.

That night, Whitehead suited up on the dirty snow of a shipping channel and paddled out to the side of a blinking buoy that marked a shallow reef. Even with a complete lack of swell from the north and south currents, every few minutes a three-foot wave was breaking on the reef with the incoming tide.

It wasn’t a great wave it wasn’t even a good wave but it was rideable, and that was enough. After paddling out at 10 P.M., with the last vestiges of sunlight pouring into the navy-blue sky, Whitehead became the first person (on record) to surf Senja. In honor of the blinking buoy that kept him company, he named the break Discos.

WHITEHEAD IS WELL PRACTICED at doing bold things in tough settings. While traveling in Mexico a year before, he’d lost his money. So he found a bike, strapped his surfboard to it, rode from Mexico City to Austin, Texas, hitched to Colorado, flew to New York, and then rode to Nova Scotia. Throughout the year in Australia, he spends “usually two or three months” working as a plumber, to earn travel money, and the rest of the time surfing, reading, and sleeping “eleven and a half hours a day.” That sleep total might make you think he’s lazy, but he was the most vigilant surfer of the group, paddling into freezing water in a leaking wetsuit, without complaint.

His tenacity was matched by Ouhilal’s hunger to find new waves. The next morning, on the drive back to Ballstad, Ouhilal took a sharp left off the highway leading to the Nordland coast. As we rolled along, he stopped at every bay inlet, every tip of a fjord, any spot that was potentially surfable. “You have to learn to be a visionary, to see things that people don’t,” he said, snapping photos of the coastline. “What I’m doing mostly is reconnaissance, taking pictures, plotting when to come back.” In the three weeks we spent in Norway, Ouhilal took upwards of 35,000 pictures and drove nearly 6,000 miles.

While driving, he ate constantly. The first week, the crew watched in amazement as he consumed almost a pound of chocolate in a single half-hour sitting. Most nights he didn’t sleep but instead pored over the forecasts for the region, scanning Google Maps for possible surf. On the trip up to Senja, he unexpectedly woke us all at 1:30 A.M., after we’d slept less than two hours, and announced we were heading out. Millin and Wach refused to go, leaving just Whitehead, me, and him for that leg of the expedition.

This insatiable drive occasionally pays off: Ouhilal has pioneered a number of Arctic surf breaks in Norway, Iceland, and Canada, and he’s one of the top cold-water surf photographers in the world. But it comes at a price. He’ll get the shots, but he’ll make your life hell in the process.

Ouhilal shrugs off any gripes. “You need determination to do this, and you need to know that 99.999 percent of the time you aren’t going to find a wave,” he said on a particularly miserable day during the trip’s first week. “A lot of people can’t handle that. I’ll just find some other hungry surfers who can.”

IT’S ABOUT 9:30 P.M. on the trip back from Senja to Ballstad; twilight has put a dark-blue lens on the sea and snow. By late April, the sun never really sets but skims along the horizon, following you at daytime like some ever-present spotlight. By night it becomes the red stagelight of a nightclub, bathing the sky in moody hues of blue, purple, and dark orange.

We’ve been driving for 14 hours straight. Just as we’re about to give up on surfing for the day, Whitehead spots the fluorescent lines of whitewater squiggling into a bay. Ouhilal stops the car on the roadside.

“Yeah, that’s surfable,” he says. Whitehead jumps into the backseat and rustles through the nest of wetsuits. Minutes later, he vanishes into a thicket of thorny bushes and bounds down the snow-and-moss-covered rocks that lead to the beach.

By the time Ouhilal and I make it to the clearing, ten minutes later, Whitehead is paddling for his first wave, a neck-high point break that lazily arches its back along an exposed black-rock reef and then catapults him down a wall of glassy water. I watch as he rides a few feet in front of me, the wave’s face reflecting the crescent moon before it shoots him into inky blackness.

For this session there are no cameras, no poses, nothing to prove. We’re just three people floating in the Arctic Ocean, surfing a wave that’s been breaking alone for tens of thousands of years. We’re the first to feel its shape, trace its movements, be a part of this big, marvelous, living thing. An hour later, as we pull ourselves from the water and retrace our steps back to the van, everyone is smiling. Whitehead names the break Broken Hearts, after a local Ballstad girl who shirked his advances last week. “To me, that makes it all worth it,” says Ouhilal. “To do this it’s a very special thing.”

A week later, Lofoten’s moody and wind-torn waters are transformed into ceramic smoothness as a new southern swell lights up the coast with dozens of waves, some pushing nine to ten feet on the face. Lofoten has finally granted us a peek at Norway’s true surf potential. It’s fickle, all right, but when it’s on, it’s like surfing nowhere else on earth.

A few days before leaving Norway, we go back to Broken Hearts with Millin and Wach and confirm with a local family that we are indeed the first to surf the break. A ten-year-old boy, Hans-Georg, watches us the entire time with wonder. He’s never touched a surfboard, and as we leave he begs us to come back. “The waves, now in spring they are so small,” he says. “Come back again. In winter, they are the size of the mountains.”

The post Tasty Freeze appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

IT’S SCARIER than Maverick’s, heavier than Waimea Bay, among the most dangerous waves in the world. On a good day its steel-gray face reaches heights of 70 feet, with a tube that stretches as long as a football field across a lethal boneyard of black rock.

This is Ghost Tree, the mammoth surf break near Monterey Bay, California, just off the 18th hole at Pebble Beach Golf Links. In the four years since it was first towed into, it has become one of the planet’s most discussed surf spots. But the monster wave could soon go back to being just part of the scenery.

The National Oceanic &Atmospheric Administration, manager of the 276-mile-long Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, is seeking to restrict the use of personal watercraft (PWCs), such as Jet Skis, in the sanctuary, claiming that they disrupt marine life. The ban would also cover Maverick’s, though conditions there, unlike at Ghost Tree, sometimes allow for safe paddle-in surfing.

“Protect the resource聴that is our primary mandate,” says Rachel Saunders, spokeswoman for the sanctuary. “At all these places, there are marine animals and seabirds resting and breeding. PWCs can get very close into shore, so we think they’re a potential disturbance.”

Tow-in surfing isn’t the first action sport to run afoul of conservation regulations. The “mechanized transport” language of the 1964 Wilderness Act has been used to close 106 million acres to mountain bikers. And in 1998, climbers were prohibited from placing fixed bolts in Forest Service聳administered wilderness areas. (The ruling was later overturned.)

So it’s easy to see how noisy, polluting PWCs make a ripe target=. But tow-in proponents claim that聴given how infrequently big-wave spots break, and the small number of people skilled or crazy enough to maneuver in such surf聴a ban is mostly symbolic.

“It comes down to a lack of education,” says Don Curry, spokesman for the Association of Professional Towsurfers and the man who named Ghost Tree. “We use PWCs three or four times a year, only when the swells get big enough. Boats are permitted to go out in these places at any time. Why shouldn’t we?”

The new rules, expected to pass this year, might allow for a limited number of special-use permits at Maverick’s. But swells generally hit with less than 24 hours’ notice and can die down even faster. By the time the paperwork went through, applicants could have little more than official documentation of the surfer’s lament: “You should have been here yesterday.”

The post Tough Break appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.