“The cave tried to keep us today.” – These were the chilling words of Jill Heinerth, legendary Canadian diver, after a horrifying near-death encounter beneath an Antarctic iceberg. What started as a daring expedition to explore the largest iceberg on record turned into a three-hour fight for survival as Heinerth and her team were sucked into the iceberg by vicious underwater currents.
Heinerth, now 60, dove hundreds of feet alongside her then-husband Paul Heinerth and late cameraman Wes Skiles, facing freezing temperatures and unpredictable waters. But on their final dive, disaster struck. The ferocious current swept them into the iceberg, closing off their exit. Trapped under tons of ice, Heinerth’s gloves leaked, freezing her hand as she clawed at the seafloor to pull herself against the current.
“It really felt like a chaotic environment. It was adapt or die,” Heinerth wrote. As the minutes stretched into hours, she led the group back towards the surface, using tiny holes made by fish to pull herself free. Exhausted, freezing, and near collapse, they reached the surface—only to face the threat of instant frostbite as wind battered their exposed skin. Her first words? “The cave tried to keep us today.”
This deadly dive, documented in her upcoming film Diving into the Darkness, reveals the harsh reality of our changing planet. Hours after the team surfaced, the iceberg shattered into pieces—a stark omen of the environmental destruction happening worldwide.
