Sinking below the waves, the first thing you notice is the detachment. You are an alien here. Your pulse spikes, your breathing accelerates. You realise your lungs strip oxygen from air—not, like most of the life you can now see, from water. It is something you have known all your life, and yet here, it seems otherworldly. Sunlight strobes through the water in thick, cloud-cut beams. The scales of fish rip colour from the sun’s spectrum—every colour you have ever imagined, and some you have not. As you move, you realise that you are swimming, moving like a sea creature through this three-dimensional world. No longer confined by gravity to trudge the surface, you float over, through, and across the strange topography, the living architecture of the most diverse coral reef on the planet. It is as close to flying as you can get without wings.
This is how environmental engineer, scientist and author Dr Paul Hardisty describes the sense of exhilaration he felt diving on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). It helps explain how someone might go from being a detached observer of one of the planet’s most awe-inspiring yet imperilled ecosystems to becoming one of its guardians. For Hardisty, that transformation unfolded with each dive, deepening his appreciation of the Reef’s luminous beauty, while sharpening his awareness of its growing vulnerability.
A Canadian by birth, Hardisty’s early understanding of the Great Barrier Reef was largely second-hand, gleaned from scientific papers, journals, and the pioneering work of earlier reef researchers. Yet once he plunged into the living, shifting cathedral of coral and experienced what he calls the ‘secret world of hidden beauty,’ he describes it in the tone of a sort of conversion experience. The Reef, with its dazzling grandeur and astonishing diversity, often has this effect on people, changing them irrevocably. Immersed in its living, complex reality, Hardisty found his newfound passion merging with a profound sense of responsibility: a duty to trace and safeguard its history of near disasters and hard-won battles, and ultimately, to defend its future against an onslaught of modern threats.
But before we get into the story of Reef, it’s worth noting that Hardisty isn’t your typical scientist. He is author of critically acclaimed action thrillers, and according to his fiction publisher Orenda Books, in a career over 25 years as an engineer, hydrologist, and environmental scientist, Hardisty has navigated oil rigs in Texas, scoured the