An introduction to polar diving.
I HAVE BEEN ACTIVELY EXPLORING the underwater world for longer than five decades. With more than 15,000 dives under my proverbial weight belt, I have enjoyed dive sites from Alaska to Argentina, from California to Curacao, and from Hawaii to Raja Ampat. I have witnessed the wonders of saltwater and freshwater ecosystems, reef communities, kelp forests, mangrove forests, the open sea, etc. My logbook includes dives made during the day and the middle of the night in the proverbial middle of nowhere. Most of my dives have been made on open circuit systems, but I have more than 200 underwater hours using semi-closed and closed-circuit rebreathers.
I don’t want to come off as a diver who thinks he has done or knows it all. Instead, I want to tell you what it was like for a diver with my background to prepare for and make my first trips to the Arctic and Antarctica. Lucky me, I was part of the Imaging Team on two trips run by Faith Ortins of Blue Green Expeditions (bluegreenexpeditions.com). Faith has led more than 25 trips to polar regions in recent years. Sharing these adventures is her passion in life.
Ten or fifteen years ago, when I mentioned my desire to explore polar waters, my comments were almost always met with a reaction that varied from “not me, not ever” to “that’s insane.” Fast forward to 2026 and you’ll soon learn that in some sport diving circles, polar diving has become one of the hottest trends in our sport. Hopefully, my experience and comments can help you and your clients get the most out of similar opportunities.
Why Explore Polar Seas
From the United States, Arctic and Antarctic exploration requires long flights and boat rides. But those inconveniences fade into the background of one’s memories compared to the rewards of visiting polar regions.
Carved by the movement of ancient ice and great expanses of ocean, the scenes are vast, stunning, alluring, and intimidating all at the same time. Being there, not just looking at what is in front of you, but truly being present in the moment is magical, awesome, and humbling, truly humbling.
Trying to describe the landscapes, seascapes, and ice formations with their seemingly unending variety of textures, colors, and sounds is incredibly challenging. When weather and water conditions are favorable, there is no more inviting place on Earth. But throw in some fog, wind, rain, sleet, snow, and bumpy seas and you will feel the remoteness of your location deep inside of you. Every day my respect for early explorers who came on lesser vessels to unmapped areas filled with myths and half-truths grew exponentially. Those times were truly the days of wooden ships and iron men.
If you are at all like me, you will get lost in introspective thought with so many feelings and facts colliding in your head. And you will ask yourself, “how did my life unfold in such a way that I am here and what can I do to get the most out of this incredible opportunity?” The sun only set for a very short period of time and I didn’t want to sleep.
There were times in the Arctic when the water was filled with low profile sheets of ice known as pancake ice for as far as one could see and that would go on for hours on end as our vessel made its way from Norway to Greenland. It was on the ice and on some islands where one might see polar bears, their footprints, or the evidence of their kills. In other locales, herds of walruses are sometimes encountered, although we struck out on my trip. That’s wilderness. Various seabirds trailed our boat many miles from land, thriving in settings that seemed overwhelming to me.
Then there were towering icebergs, structures of greatly varying ages that calved from glaciers. Some were roughly the size of our 297-foot-long boat. Others were large enough to dwarf our ship many times over. The colors of the icebergs varied due to their age, where and how they were created, and by how heavy various layers were as the combination of age and weight can create veins of brilliant blue that highlight some “bergs” and mountainsides.
Glaciers and icebergs are melting and shrinking. That is the reality of climate change. In Iceland, we hiked a glacier, a big tourist attraction for years. We are told it will be gone in 7 to 8 years. Not 700 or 7,000 or 7,000,000, but 7 short years. Greatly accelerated by our species, climate change is changing the natural beauty of seascape and landscape on a minute-by-minute basis. That makes me feel ashamed. It is all too easy to blame others, but the reality is we are all connected to the issue in some way.
On the trip to Antarctica, we traversed the legendary Drake Passage and were more than 600 miles from Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost city in South America. A scientist on the trip studying the presence of microplastics and nanoplastics found them in one form or another every time but one when he took a water sample. Human-made plastics are in so many products, and they are also in the food consumed by krill, whales, seals, fishes, seabirds etc. That’s on us!
On my trips, we encountered more wildlife in Antarctica. Penguins – gentoos, chinstraps, and Adelies – were almost omnipresent. We also spotted a few emperor and king penguins. The various species display similar, yet different behaviors when chasing prey at breakneck speeds, courting, nesting, caring for their young, and socializing or quarreling amongst themselves, thus providing unending entertainment. Other seabirds ranging from tiny terns to colorful cormorants also commanded our attention.
We witnessed pods of killer whales, humpback whales that were feeding and others that breached repeatedly. On the ice we saw a variety of seals with the highlights being several close passes with eagerly sought after leopard seals, impressive carnivores with a well-deserved reputation as a very capable predator.
How This Might Involve You: Unless you are one of a relatively small handful of dive centers, it is unlikely that your store will put a large enough group together to charter a full boat to either Arctic waters or the continent of Antarctic. Group sizes vary, but you need a big, seaworthy vessel, and that requires a lot of divers and/or snorkelers to make a trip financially possible. A trip costs $15,000 at a minimum and that does not include dive equipment, airfare, or travel expenses.
That said, you very well might have a client or even a small number of clients ask you to help them join a polar expedition. As unlikely as it would have seemed only a few years ago, it is happening all over the United States today.
So, let’s also look at what a diver needs and how you can help your clients, even if you or your dive center is not leading or going on the trip.
Keeping Warm: Some Scuba Diving Industry Magazine readers have quite a bit of experience diving and selling drysuits. Others have minimal to no experience. In any case, divers need a drysuit, dry gloves, and the right undergarments. But more important than owning the equipment is diving with the equipment enough to be competent using it before a trip to polar regions.
In addition to drysuit undergarments, a lot of divers use heated gloves and a heated vest or even a fully heated suit worn under the drysuit. These items require practice setting up the equipment in a timely manner and using them effectively in the water. The gear will also greatly impact a diver’s buoyancy. The takeaway message is that the Arctic and Antarctic waters are not the places to learn how to set up and operate your equipment.
A properly fitting 10mm or 11mm thick hood is recommended. A diver will want to be sure to try it on and wear it during practice dives. If it is too small, that much rubber creates significant jaw discomfort. If the hood is too large, it leads to the constant exchange of cold water and/or air pockets. Once again, the takeaway message is to get what is needed well ahead of a trip and make some pre-trip dives to get comfortable with the equipment.
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Dry Glove:s One of the more common problems divers face in polar waters is cold hands. Hands and fingers don’t just get cold, they hurt and quit working. Dry gloves help. Heated dry gloves help more. But even then, cold hands are a big obstacle for many snorkelers and divers. When your hands go numb, it can be very difficult to perform simple, yet vital, tasks such as clearing a mask, depressing the inflate and deflate buttons on a bc, adjusting a weight belt, removing your bc and fins, operating camera systems, assisting a buddy, etc.
No doubt about it, dry glove systems are bulky and even when wearing them in the comfort of your home, you lose a lot of dexterity and the ability to feel and do things with your hands. To help get the “feel of things” before my trips, I set up my camera system and put it on my living room table. For one month, every time I walked past the table I put on my heated dry gloves and practiced manipulating the controls on my camera housing and strobes. I thought I had things all figured out, but on my first practice dive in southern California I was unable to turn on my strobes because I could not get a grip on the controls in the water like I could in my living room. To solve the problem, I attached a weight keeper to my strobes and used them to turn my strobes on and off. That is just one example of the benefits derived from in-water practice.
The batteries made for heated gloves are typically connected via a wiring system that passes through the inflator valve of a drysuit. That might require purchasing a different valve and having it installed on the drysuit to allow your heated gloves to function.
Buoyancy and Body Heat: Getting proficient diving with a drysuit requires some practice. At first, almost everyone feels overly buoyant and somewhat “out of control.”
Even if you are an experienced dry suit diver, odds are you will need to wear much thicker undergarments than you have used in warmer waters, and that in turn increases your buoyancy. Some people wear 40 pounds or more of lead when diving in polar seas. Once again, pre-trip dives will likely pay big dividends.
Two Regulators and an H-Valve: Diving in water that is hovering around freezing (28.4 F in saltwater) means using regulators that are not environmentally sealed, which many are not, and employing improper techniques can cause a regulator to freeze up or develop an unmanageable free flow. Divers require two environmentally sealed regulators and an octopus to make a dive. In addition, divers need to bring or have access to an H-valve, a tank valve that allows two regulators to be attached to a single tank at the same time. A diver also needs to learn how to configure their H-valve set-up. A two-regulator, octopus, H-valve system add expense and weight when handling gear before, during, after a dive, and when traveling.
The expense, required pre-trip preparation, added weight, and limited number of dives that can be made on a single polar expedition (one dive a day with two on some days is the rule) causes a significant number of polar explorers to snorkel while foregoing scuba diving. Much of what can be seen can be enjoyed at the surface. A diver will miss seeing icebergs from underwater and will likely miss out on some animal encounters, but snorkeling instead of diving saves a lot of expense, time, and energy on location, while still providing some wonderful in-water experiences.
On the Plane: To my knowledge, the more popular heating systems for drysuits and dry gloves use lithium-ion batteries. On planes, all lithium-ion batteries need to be packed in carry-on luggage. Travelers want to be sure they can pack all batteries, medicines, their passport, credit cards, money, etc. in carry-on luggage while complying with the carry-on rules imposed by various air carriers.
The cost, required pre-trip equipment familiarization, and the long plane rides and boat trips make some divers pass on joining a diving expedition to polar waters. But I’ll promise you that for many the inconveniences will be exponentially outweighed by the experiences of polar exploration.
Clearly, this piece is an introduction to polar diving. There is much more to learn. But one thing you can be sure of is that interest in diving and snorkeling in both the Arctic and Antarctic is a growing part of the recreational diving.
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