You have probably heard of scuba diving in the Red Sea and even in the Black Sea, but have you heard of diving in the White Sea? Scuba diving in the Arctic? You’d have to be crazy to do that? Yes, yes, and yes again!
Ice diving is one of the most daring and extreme dives in the world of scuba diving. While most popular and easily accessible locations for this include lakes that freeze in winter, two places are truly incredible and exciting — Antarctica and the White Sea in Russia (the Arctic). In these places, a whole new world opens up beneath the ice. Since cold water contains more oxygen than warm water, it provides a richer environment for marine life to thrive, and extreme conditions lead to the emergence of species specific exclusively to these regions. The cold also makes the water as clear as air: visibility in the water often exceeds 40–50 metres, and in McMurdo Sound (Antarctica), visibility reaches an incredible 300 metres! But although visibility is much higher in Antarctica, diving in the White Sea is more accessible.
Ice diving
The coast of the White Sea can be reached by rail; it is about a 27-hour journey north of Moscow. To go scuba diving here, every diver must hold a scuba diving certificate from any professional diving association and possess drysuit skills. Also, each diver must have at least twenty logged dives in a drysuit. Divers head to the dive sites on snowmobiles and plunge under the ice through rectangular ice holes cut out. The ice thickness in such holes can sometimes reach 1.5 metres,
Before plunging into the water, you must check your equipment. To start with, you should have several layers of clothing under your undersuit, rubber outer gloves, neoprene hoods, full-face masks, and regular fins. As for technology, you can bring a photo camera and a video camera. And you must have a canister diving torch.
And then, finally, a diver with lead weights takes the plunge. Given the increased likelihood of regulators freezing, you can either purge it with a free flow of air or shut off the air supply completely. Thus, each scuba cylinder must have two regulators, which must be in a cold-water version.
Diving in the White Sea — Starfish
Divers descend in pairs with a safety line tied to each participant’s belt. A tender on the surface holds the rope, the end of which is secured with an ice axe.
And here at last you, thanks to a diving torch, will see that the scenery is magnificent: stone walls plunge into the depths, kelp sways, ice masses tower on the surface, and the shimmering sunlight streaming through the pressure ridges above turns everything into a kaleidoscope. Starfish of various colours and shapes lie on the rocks below. Dense forests of large round anemones of bright, almost psychedelic colours together with sponges and algae line the bottom, and rainbow-tinted jellyfish, cod, wolffish, sea bass, and butterfish occasionally swim by.
The White Sea in Russia is truly one of the most unique places for diving and one of the best places in the world for ice dives. Diving here is the perfect way to immerse yourself in winter and at the same time observe beautiful marine life.
