Diving in the Maldives

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The Maldives, officially the Republic of Maldives, is a small archipelagic state in South Asia. It lies in the Indian Ocean southwest of Sri Lanka and India, about 700 kilometres (430 mi) from the Asian continent's mainland. The chain of 26 atolls stretches across the Equator from Ihavandhippolhu Atoll in the north to Addu Atoll in the south. The land area is roughly 298 square kilometres (115 sq mi). Malé is the capital.

The Maldives has white sand beaches, coral reefs, clear warm waters, numerous scuba diving sites and rich marine life. Most holiday resorts in the Maldives have a scuba diving facility and there are a number of liveaboard operators offering scuba diving cruise holidays.

In the 1998 global coral bleaching, much of the coral in the Maldives was bleached due to the El Niño event combined with global warming. In 2016, global warming and the El Nino event heated the Maldives, which, with land reclamation and water pollution, bleached and killed 75% of corals in the Maldives.^[1][2]