JILL HEINERTH - Explorer, Presenter, Author of “Into The Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver”

Jill Heinerth is a Canadian cave diver, underwater explorer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker. She is a veteran of over thirty years of filming, photography, and exploration on projects in submerged caves around the world. She has made TV series, consulted on movies, written several books and is a frequent corporate keynote speaker. Jill is the first Explorer in Residence for the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, recipient of Canada’s prestigious Polar Medal and is a Fellow of the International Scuba Divers Hall of Fame. In recognition of her lifetime achievement, Jill was awarded the Sir Christopher Ondaatje Medal for Exploration from the RCGS and the William Beebe Award from the Explorers Club.

“It's such a privilege swimming through these places. And I almost feel like I'm getting a secret peak into the body of the planet and that's a very precious and almost a sacred kind of collaboration where I get to experience this, I get to see this, but if I'm going to take these insanely challenging risks I need to make it worthwhile and share what I've seen so that other people have the benefit of understanding, a better conception of our connected planet. Both in the short term and in the long term scale as well. The sense of time can be warped by what's going on in my brain, so I do have this dance between left brain and right brain. Left brain pragmatic, right brain creative.

So if I'm managing a complicated life support device while I'm shooting stills or video underwater, there's a dual thing going on. The creative side of my brain loses all track of time, just as anyone that would ever sit down to paint or draw or even play on the computer. Time is just gone. But that left side of the brain has to keep track of time and constantly be monitoring my life support status. So there's a very present sense of time and forcing my brain back into keeping track of that, but these places that I swim through are timeless in the sense that many caves that I'm swimming through are like museums of natural history that inform us about things that happened in very ancient times on planet earth. So I'm swimming through this temporal portal to have a peek at ancient history.”

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