72 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE 11.19
FROMLEFT:^ COURTESY^OFMOLEKULE;COURTESY^OFBENKUHNSthan 25 years. “I personally have
been to the emergency room
four times through the years for
everything from broken ribs and
a broken shoulder to lacerations.”
At Buddy, which is backed
by Lloyd’s of London, accident
coverage costs $10 for a day, $21
for a week, or $55 for a month,
and payouts range from $500 to
$50,000. There’s no deductible,
and the payout can be used for
any purpose.
So far, Arizona, Colorado,
Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio,
Tennessee, and Texas have given
Buddy the thumbs-up and are
currently the only states in
which you can purchase a policy
if you’re a resident. Once pur-
chased, the policy covers you
wherever you plan to adventure,
whether it’s your backyard,
across the U.S., or internation-
ally. Buddy expects to be avail-
able for purchase in dozens of
other states by mid-2020. And
you don’t have to worry about
being rejected: everyone is eli-
gible for Buddy’s policies.
Meanwhile, other companies
with similar approaches have hit
the market. There’s Spot, which
is rolling out accident and life
insurance geared toward the ad-
venturous with prices varying
by state, as well as Trov, which
covers gear (like bikes and skis)
on a sliding scale that starts
at less than $1 a day. So when
you’re on the edge of a gnarly
couloir or about to paddle Class
IV rapids and suddenly get the
heebie-jeebies, you can now get
a last-minute safety net. “Our
goal,” Paul says, “is to help out-
door enthusiasts live their lives
more fearlessly.”
Fat suit
SURFERS STAY
WARMER WITH
ARTIFICIAL BLUBBER
BY PETER
ANDREY SMITH
Submerge yourself in water
below 50 degrees and you might
last an hour before losing con-
sciousness. Wearing a neoprene
wetsuit or a drysuit can double
that, but even those getups have
issues. In 2017, Jeffrey Moran,
then a postdoctoral researcher at
MIT, interviewed surfers in San
Diego, a professional underwa-
ter photographer, and curators
at the New England Aquarium in
Boston. He identified two com-
plaints about wetsuits: they’re
not warm enough, and they’re
too difficult to get in and out of.
Moran, now a professor at
George Mason University, de-
vised a way to roughly triple sur-
vival times in 50-degree water
wearing only a wetsuit. Wetsuits
are made of neoprene, a foam
insulation that traps tiny air
bubbles. By putting a suit inside
a sealed container and pump-
ing it with xenon or krypton
gas, Moran and his colleagues
at MIT found that it’s possible
to replace those air pockets with
inert gas. This, he says, results
in wetsuits that are 40 percent
thinner or have double or triple
the insulating properties.
The team dubbed the inven-
tion artificial blubber and their
first scientific paper was pub-
lished in 2018. The gas treat-
ment doesn’t require a special-
ized suit, but the downside is
that the effect lasts only about
20 hours before the gas leaks
out. “You don’t want to have to
recharge your wetsuit every time
you go for a dive,” Moran says.
Now he’s trying to find a pli-
able material that will trap the
gases indefinitely, perhaps the
stuff used in space blankets that
marathoners wear after crossing
the finish. A silver lining in the
suit would “not only prevent the
gas from diffusing out,” he says,
“it would also reflect some of
the thermal radiation produced
by the diver back into the body.”Natural-
History
Horror Films
THE BEST WAY TO
GET PEOPLE TO DO
SOMETHING ABOUT
CLIMATE CHANGE IS TO
FREAK THEM OUT WITH
EPIC IMAGERY
BY LUKE WHELANNear the end of the first episode
of the Netflix nature series
Our Planet, which streamed
in 33 million households after
premiering last April, the camera
pans over the vast Greenland ice
sheet, then lingers on a bird’s-
eye view of where it suddenly
meets the ocean. Small pieces
of ice start to crumble, then
larger chunks, and finally, as the
symphonic music swells, whole
sheets explode into the sea.
“Within 20 minutes, 75 million
tons of ice break free,” observes
David Attenborough.
This scene is one of many in
the Emmy-nominated, eight-
episode series that combine cin-
ematic fireworks with the urgent
message of human-caused cli-
mate crisis and habitat destruc-
tion. Coproducers Keith Scholey
and Alastair Fothergill mastered
the use of cutting-edge cam-
era technologies and natural-
history storytelling while work-
ing for the BBC Natural History
Unit (the outfit behind the ac-
claimed Planet Earth and Blue
Planet series). For Our Planet,
they employed the same tools
and techniques but with the fo-
cused purpose of presenting the
terrifying transformations un-
folding around the globe. “Weknew from past experience that
if you don’t dazzle, you won’t
get the big audience,” Scholey
says. “And if you don’t get the
big audience, you’re wasting
your time with the message.”
A crew of 600 spread out
across 60 different countries
with drones and 4K cameras
rigged with custom-built stabi-
lization systems to capture se-
quences in ultra HD that are as
devastating as they are stunning.
An underwater camera illumi-
nates Australia’s Great Barrier
Reef before and after a massive
coral-bleaching event. Drones
follow endangered bluefin tuna
and a rare blue whale and her calf
as they swim through the open
Pacific Ocean. High- resolution
satellite images reveal massive
phytoplankton blooms off the
Florida Keys. This phenomenon
plays an important role in creat-
ing the earth’s (increasingly un-
stable) weather systems, which
the show captured using time-
lapses of thunderheads. “We
were constantly looking to push
technology to its limits in the
field,” says Our Planet director
and producer Sophie Lanfear.
The collapsing ice in Green-
land at the end of the first epi-
sode is the crown jewel. Land
and aerial teams monitored an
unstable glacier night and day
for three weeks so they’d be
able to deploy their camera sys-
tems—two on a fjord across the
glacier and one on a helicopter
to film above it—at the exact
right moment. Their patience
paid off: the calving event took
place on the last day of filming,
during the last hour of sunlight.
“You need to see the magnitude
of this kind of thing to get an im-
pression of what climate change
can be,” Scholey says. “It’s abso-
lutely huge.”SHELTER FROM THE STORM
For decades tent manufacturers across the country complied with a California state law that
required flame retardants on all their shelters. Problem is, these chemicals are carcinogenic and
wind up in the air inside tents. Applying the retardants has also hamstrung designers into relying
on the same tired materials. But this year, Mountain Hardwear became the first major American
brand to stop using fire retardants across its entire line, which could spur a new wave of lighter
and thinner shelters that won’t, of course, be sold in California. —W.T.