INTO THE PLANET

Enchanting tales of “swimming through the veins of Mother Earth.”

Heinerth (The Scuba Diver’s Guide to Underwater Video, 2016, etc.), an award-winning Canadian filmmaker and professional cave diver, delivers an exhilarating, deeply personal memoir about her career as a woman in a male-dominated profession. In spare, crisp prose, she chronicles a “life immersed in a relationship with this element that nourishes and destroys, buoys and drowns—that has both freed me and taken the lives of my friends.” She has learned to “accept and welcome fear” because, as she notes, “more people have died exploring underwater caves than climbing Mount Everest.” Heinerth recounts fighting sudden, torrential underwater cave streams, developing new diving equipment, and suffering decompression illness. She began with diving lessons and got hooked. At 27, she left a lucrative job in Toronto to work at a dive resort in Grand Cayman, guiding visitors through long, sinuous tunnels. On a solo dive, she discovered her first cave, filled with ornate stalactites. The author got certified as a cavern diving expert, later making a name for herself with underwater photography and articles in diving magazines. She chronicles her adventures exploring Florida’s vast network of caves and, in Mexico, a six-hour round-trip swim into the world’s deepest cave. Next up, in 1995, she helped survey the world’s longest underwater cave. A few years later, she was one of the divers to make the first 3-D imaging of an underwater cave. In 2001, with support from National Geographic, she embarked on one of her most incredible adventures. A massive iceberg in the Antarctic Circle had broken off the Ross Ice Shelf, and Heinerth and her crew battled 60-foot wave peaks and ice floes on a Shackleton-esque journey to explore a part of it. Deep within, they found an “ecosystem living in total isolation, an undiscovered world thriving in darkness.”

Told with sensitivity and joyful enthusiasm, this is an inspiring story that will appeal to many, especially adventurous young women.