Covering a diving championship in Greece on a hot and sticky assignment for Outside magazine
James Nestor discovered free diving. He had stumbled on one of the most extreme sports in
existence: a quest to extend the frontiers of human experience in which divers descend without
breathing equipment for hundreds of feet below the water for minutes after they should have
died from lack of oxygen. Sometimes they emerge unconscious or bleeding from the nose and ears
and sometimes they don't come up at all. The free divers were Nestor's way into an exhilarating
and dangerous world of deep-sea pioneers underwater athletes scientists spear fishermen
billionaires and ordinary men and women who are poised on the brink of some amazing discoveries
about the ocean. Soon he was visiting the scientists who live 60ft underwater (and are
permanently high on nitrous dioxide) swimming with the notorious man-eating sharks of R¿ion
and descending thousands of feet in a homemade submarine. And on the way down he learnt about
the amazing amphibious reflexes activated in the human body under deep-water conditions why
dolphins were injected with LSD in an attempt to teach them to talk and why sharks like AC DC.
The sea covers seventy per cent of Earth's surface and still contains answers to questions
about the world we are only beginning to ask: Deep blends science and adventure to uncover its
amazing secrets.
