The Last Witnesses

How bad is it? Jaenicke: “It’s brutal. The film about the Arctic and the polar bear has been cut; it shows how cold-blooded big game hunters still shoot the animals down. The documentary about sharks is in the can. At the end we were in Spain. In Vigo they process fins en masse for the Chinese. This is not easy viewing. There is no animal that gets so misjudged and barbarically massacred as the shark! And why? Because some religions believe they have to cook shark fin soup and lots of people here consider shark-steaks and smoked strips of dogfish a delicacy.”

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– Silent World

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A dive into Thor‘s World

Once again twilight has dipped Iceland in soft light until the morning. You could see the ships out of the window at night, anchored in the bay. During the summer solstice, the sun never sets completely, nor rises again before the night is over. Starting this early in the day still takes getting used to – eager anticipation does not change this: we are on the way from Reykjavik to Thingvellir, inland. To experience the underwater world at the edge of the valley should outshine everything previously experienced: everyone is an intrepid explorer in the cave system of the Silfra crack.

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The free diver

Others are paralyzed by the breathless silence. Christian Redl lives more intensely in it for six to seven minutes. The Austrian is reckoned an eccentric in the diving scene. Recently he dived into one of the limestone caves on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. Outside scrub and mosquitoes, inside clean fresh water for a while – then nothing but a mystical fog of sulfur sulfate. Redl managed the 60 meters down to the bottom. Free divers find the meaning of life in depth and distance records. Average breathers can only imagine it, having seen Luc Besson’s “The Big Blue”. Redl is not attached to a pulling sledge, when going down.

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The Cockpit of the A380

Ingo Meyerdierks is now 46. When the teachers asked him back then what he wanted to be when he grew up, he answered, like all boys: “Pilot”. He was 14 and had his head in the clouds. The sky was always the gateway to the world to him. Meyerdierks is now head of Lufthansa’s A380 fleet. It is a year since the largest passenger aircraft ever built took off for the first time with passengers from Frankfurt Airport. Public interest was huge because of the sheer size of the wide-body jet. It continues down to today. With its height of more than 24 meters, the megaliner is superior to most goings on at international airports.

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– WESER KURIER
– WELT am SONNTAG

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Egypt – Quo Vadis?

The popular uprising in 2010 banished the tourists from Egypt. Now the country are of high priority again. The Red Sea: Hans Hass and Jacques Cousteau dived ahead – thousends upon thousends followed. The small town Dahab on the Sinai Pininsula is still a place of pilgrimage. „The hype surrounding the blue hole – uncredible“, says the marine biologist Dr. Robert Hofrichter. On some days a caravan of Hundrets of snorkelers and divers is moving to the 110 meters deep hole. The natural phenomenon, just a stone’s throw away from the beach, is considered as one of the most dangerous diving plaves in the world. The memorial tables at the rocks are telling the dramas.

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