Does the future of scuba diving lie outside the oceans?

Designed to resemble a sunken metropolis, the pool takes the form of a supersized funnel. Two ‘habitats’ towards the top contain the bulk of its ‘furniture’—from an arcade games room to the root system of a huge tree that seemingly sprouted from the ruins before they were engulfed by water.

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Advanced open water (AOW) divers can plunge deeper into the narrower section to explore a fully furnished apartment surrounding the tunnel that was ‘abandoned’ with the living room TV frozen on a CNN report. Tec Trimix divers (a type of deep diving certification) can also discover a few more attractions, including a luxury car garage, en route to the bottom. This is Dubai, after all.

When I reach 30 meters (nearly 100 feet), which is the maximum depth for AOW divers, I hover in the warm water (kept at a constant 30°C/86°F), admiring a surreal work of street art. Once I’m done admiring, my Danish dive guide Jesper Kjøller, a veteran diving educator who now heads Deep Dive Dubai’s marketing department, leads me back up to the surface through this modern-day Atlantis. Amid scientific predictions of unprecedented sea level rises during the next 30 years, my experience is as eerie as it is entertaining—trying (and failing) to play pool, in a pool, is definitely a first.

“While marine tourism is important to local economic gain, it can put a lot of extra pressure on local reefs, leading to greater effects for the ecosystems.”

- Sam Craven/Reef-World Foundation

Costing a reported US$10.6 million to build, Deep Dive Dubai is essentially another expensive exercise in the emirate’s quest to have the biggest and the best of everything. But could human-made diving pools also play a role, I wonder, in helping to safeguard the world’s increasingly declining coral reef systems by offering alternative underwater playgrounds?

Scuba diving is widely credited for raising awareness of environmental issues and contributing to sustainable development. However, studies have also found that the increasing popularity of diving is negatively impacting marine environments, particularly in destinations where the industry isn’t tightly regulated.

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“While marine tourism is important to local economic gain, it can put a lot of extra pressure on local reefs, leading to greater effects for the ecosystems,” says Sam Craven, programmes manager for UK-based charity The Reef-World Foundation, which implements the Green Fins marine conservation initiative in partnership with the UN. Often, Craven adds, divers aren’t even aware of the physical damage they cause.

“Reef-World’s research showed that 88 percent of divers make contact with the reef at least once per dive, but only 36 percent of those were aware they did so,” he explains.

PADI, the world’s largest scuba diving certifier, is now issuing more than one million certifications globally each year. That’s a lot of divers impacting one of the world’s critical ecosystems—an ecosystem that underpins the food and economic security of hundreds of millions of people.

“Divers tend to do the most damage when they’re still learning to control their buoyancy, so learning to dive or use a camera in a diving pool offers an opportunity to get comfortable in an environment where they can’t do any harm.”

- Jesper Kjøller, dive guide

Estimated to reach a value of US$8 billion by 2026, the booming underwater camera market isn’t helping, with a recent study linking underwater camera use by divers to a higher incidence of environmental disturbance.

Green Fins aims to minimize the negative impacts of marine tourism by certifying dive and snorkel operators who are improving their environmental practices. In 2021, it levelled up to launch an e-course to help recreational divers protect coral reefs, which includes camera guidelines.

In a diving pool, however, it doesn’t matter if you bump anything with your dive gear. “Divers tend to do the most damage when they’re still learning to control their buoyancy, so learning to dive or use a camera in a diving pool offers an opportunity to get comfortable in an environment where they can’t do any harm,” Kjøller tells me.

Complete with huge windows on the top two floors, allowing non-divers to watch the action from the facility’s reception area, café and classrooms (you can take free-diving classes here too), Deep Dive Dubai is easily the world’s best diving pool. But it wasn’t the first.

Opened in 2020, Poland’s Deepspot is a 45-meter-deep (147-foot) pool complete with a sunken boat. It’s five meters (16 feet) deeper than northern Italy’s Y-40, which features swim-through caves, while over in the UK, the team behind Blue Abyss claim their dive pool currently in development will eclipse’s Dubai’s record for the biggest and deepest, with “space mission-certified instructors” on hand to deliver “zero-gravity experiences.”

It would be a bonus for coral reefs, of course, if dive pools were also environmentally sustainable.

Holding 14 million litres of fresh water—the equivalent of six Olympic-sized swimming pools—Deep Dive Dubai doesn’t seem like a particularly planet-friendly attraction to build in a country among the 17 global nations facing the greatest risk of water stress.

“But it’s not like a golf course that depends on a constant supply,” says Kjøller. The pool was only filled once, he explains, with the water filtered and circulated every six hours using a combination of siliceous volcanic rock, NASA-developed technology and UV radiation to keep it squeaky clean.

With the high-tech filtration system alone no doubt requiring a considerable volume of energy to power (solar is currently used only to heat the changing room showers), Deep Dive Dubai isn’t exactly without an environmental footprint. At AED1,200 (US$330) per certified dive, it’s not particularly cheap either. 

But if this emerging arm of the dive industry can play even a cameo role in protecting coral reefs by offering opportunities for adventure and skill-building that give the natural marine environment a break, perhaps it’s worth the plunge.