The swell pounding relentlessly against the reef put me in a trance. I was sweating within my wetsuit, and could not wait to jump in the water. And so I did, knowing that what I was going to see would change my life forever.

It was August 25, 2005, and that was my first dive at Kingman Reef, a remote coral atoll barely breaking the surface of the central Pacific Ocean thousands of miles south of Hawaii. This is what I wrote in my daily journal that evening:

“Eureka! We found it. A pristine reef where corals are alive and healthy and form a forest so thick that there is no space even for sand between them. A reef where sharks are not used to seeing humans and, instead of swimming away, they come by the dozens and swim around you during the entire dive. A reef where one's heartbeat doubles as soon as you disappear below the surface. This is Kingman Reef, the pearl of the Line Islands.”

Kingman was the endpoint of a research expedition that I organized together with my friend and colleague, Dr. Stuart Sandin of Scripps Institution of Oceanography. We assembled an international team of 16 marine scientists and surveyed the coral reefs of the northern Line Islands, from degraded to healthy, from the smallest creature to the largest. Our goal was to determine what reefs must have looked like in prehistoric times, and to understand how humans have transformed them.

But we only scratched the surface. We spent five days at Kingman, which sailed through our hearts and minds as fast as a green flash. Realizing that Kingman was the closest thing to a pristine coral reef we had ever seen, we dreamed of coming back and conducting a comprehensive exploration and scientific survey of this uninhabited atoll, from the shallow giant clam gardens in its lagoon to the deeper reef where sharks swim up from the darkness.

And here we are, a team of nine scientists, a videographer, and National Geographic underwater photographer Brian Skerry, doing the last errands in Honolulu before departing to Kingman tomorrow morning.

Kingman is a time machine that can take us to the era when humans were absent and sharks were kings. I cannot wait to dive it again, and to report to you through this website.

Learn more about the 2005 Line Islands Expedition.

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