BERMUDA'S underwater caverns are to be mapped as part of an ambitious project involving one of the world's foremost cave divers. Likely to showcase regions of the island never seen before, the study will be completed over the next year, its various stages filmed as a documentary ? Bermuda High.

Bermuda's schoolchildren will be invited to participate in the monumental task, presented with special technology that will enable them to track the movements of the divers from above ground. The project is being driven by the Bermuda Aquarium Museum & Zoo, former natural history curator Wolfgang Sterrer and cave expert Tom Iliffe.

To aid its completion, they've brought onboard an award-winning film-maker who also happens to be one of the world's top cave divers ? Jill Heinerth. This week she spoke with Mid-Ocean News reporter HEATHER WOOD and photographer GLENN TUCKER about her underwater exploits.

Q: How did you become involved with the Bermuda project?

A: We were invited by the Bermuda Bio-diversity Project to come last year and look at the caves. They were interested in looking at different strategies for protecting them, one of those strategies being that if you show people the beauty and help them to understand the water resources, then they'll want to protect them.

I came with a dear friend, Dr. Tom Iliffe, who's worked here for many years. To Tom, this is the most special place on the planet. It's such a unique, bio-diversity hot spot that he's been ? for years ? trying to get my partner Wes Skiles and I to come here.

Once I got here I was just blown away by the beauty of the resources, by the efforts to want to protect them and also by the incredible interest in conservation and the environment not just within Government agencies, but in the citizenry as well. So ever since then we've been eager to come back and try and float this project.

Q: What do you hope Bermuda will learn from the project?

A: I'm really excited about it. I'm a film-maker, but in my heart I'm an environmentalist, a conservationist, an educator. I love reaching out to people who are eager to learn, with new information.

I'm confident that Bermudians want to know more about their natural history, their geology and the caves and so I really hope that I can bring some tangible, educational resources to Bermudians that they can use and embrace within the school system for fun and entertainment and education.

I also think that this project is an archetype. Bermuda is doing so many things well already in terms of conservation, the rest of the world can learn from that and I hope that by creating this programme that we reach out internationally and show Bermuda as a wonderful example to the world.

Q: How does one become one of the world's top diving experts?

A: By accident, I guess. I've been very fortunate to participate in just some incredible expeditions all around the world and I suppose it really started through my own passion to volunteer for some of these projects. Through them I had some wonderful opportunities. It's how I met Wes and began my film-making career with him. He saw me running an expedition in north Florida. As well as being the lead exploration diver I was doing all the organisational aspects, I was writing dispatches. Because I was doing all that, he said I could be a film producer.

I said, 'Okay, what does a film producer do?' And it was not too much longer after that the two of us went to Antarctica on a project that was sponsored by the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute to intercept the largest iceberg in recorded history and cave dive inside of it.

I guess I'm known for my interest in the technology end of diving. I really like puzzles. I love it when someone says, 'We want to go here but we don't know how to do this'. I love figuring out a way to do something that nobody's ever done before.

Certainly in Antarctica, Wes said, 'I've never been on an ice dive. I don't know much about what caves would be like, what'd it be like swimming in an iceberg. Can you figure it out?' So I brought re-breather technology to the project to keep us warmer and allow us to dive longer. We did some really exciting dives there as well as making a film in the process.

Q: What is a re-breather?

A: Normal scuba, when you inhale, you take in a breath of air, you exhale and you make bubbles. With a re-breather, each of those bubbles that you've exhaled has a lot of useable oxygen left in there. So the re-breather has hoses that come right around the front. Your exhaled breath is captured by the system and then the carbon dioxide is scrubbed out of that exhalation and injected with a tiny bit of additional oxygen.

You keep using the gas over and over again. We once did a 300-foot dive. Had we done that dive with standard scuba cylinders we would literally have used dozens of scuba cylinders, probably a hundred scuba cylinders to create that dive.

But instead I was able to use a (single, small tank) in order to do the whole thing. It creates a gas savings, it means you make no bubbles ? so it's wonderful when you're having interactions with fish ? and it's warmer because the chemical reaction cleaning the gas supply is warm. It's exactly what someone uses when they go on a space walk.

Q: A 300-foot dive? Is that a world record?

A: We did it as part of a project we were working on. The record is for the longest, deepest dive into a cave ? 300 feet deep, nearly two miles back into the cave and for 21 hours. Because Bermuda's so isolated, sitting here in the middle of the Atlantic on a very small patch of land, everybody is forced to conserve. They have to conserve water and other resources, protect their land ? whatever your neighbour does will affect you.

Because of that my sense is that (residents) warmly embrace conservation and warmly embrace learning even when they don't have the knowledge or the tools to understand the environment. Other parts of the world have amazing caves as well but other parts of the world have the luxury of space and the luxury of more water resources ? and they've squandered those as a result.

We're using water faster than it's replenished in Florida. There are people who use caves as disposal sites because if you push it in the hole it goes away ? it may be out of sight, but it's not out of your drinking water supply.

I think many other places and people in the world can learn from what Bermudians are already doing and I think that Bermudians are eager to learn more about their environment and embrace protection and conservation.

Q: What do you look for on a dive? New species? Elements of the cave itself?

A: I'm such a visual person. I'm a still photographer as well as a film-maker and I can hardly go on a dive without having a task load ? taking pictures, shooting videos or something like that. I love the geology.

It's like swimming through a cathedral that you can just float through. By breathing in you can float up to see the most amazing formations, by exhaling you can drop down and see just beautiful rock formations and try to understand how the water carved to the conduits. It's very interesting to me. The biology is fascinating. The fact that creatures within these caves lived only in one place on the entire planet ? perhaps in only a room in a single cave ? is just fascinating to me.

I also think it's fascinating that these creatures are some of the oldest creatures on the planet, that they've remained unchanged for a long time because they've lived in an unchanged and stable environment, partially. That's all so interesting to me. It's just a big puzzle to put together.

Q: When did you start diving?

A: My first dive was 26 years ago. I worked in a swimming pool as a lifeguard and I was involved in all sorts of water sports in my youth. I grew up in Canada so I swam and I paddled and I played water polo and did synchronised swimming and everything else.

I always wanted to scuba dive. I loved watching Jacques Cousteau. My parents said, 'People don't dive in Canada. It's too cold.' It was one of the only things that they didn't sort of push me forward and encourage me on.

It was when I became a lifeguard that one day they asked if I knew how to work the scuba gear. I said yes, which was a complete lie. They wanted me to clean some grout in between some tiles of the swimming pool and so they sent me off to go do that.

I went into this little closet, looked at all the equipment and I figured out how to put it together and then jumped in the swimming pool with a little brush and was cleaning the algae off the grout. I was as happy as I could be that I was diving. It's not the way you're supposed to learn to dive but for me that was a dream realised and not too long after, I took a formal class and was properly trained.

Q: And your interest just sparked from that?

A: The weekend that I became an open water diver ? which was the first level. I went to a place called Tobermory, an amazing place for shipwrecks in the Great Lakes. And on my open water weekend we dove four different historic shipwrecks ? they were spectacular. And, we dove in a cave ? again, something you're supposed to do.

I was just so captivated. I'd been waiting so long to do this that the very next weekend I went back up to Tobermory and I took my advanced scuba class and then the very next weekend I was back up. Within a year I'd become a dive master and soon after, an instructor, simply because I was diving every weekend. I was just hooked and I never stopped.

Q: Did you take formal photography classes?

A: My training in university is a bachelor of fine arts, mostly in visual communications design ? I actually had an ad agency in my first career in Canada ? but photography was my minor so I always had a camera in my hand.

I moved from Canada to the Cayman Islands so I could dive more, and from there ended up in Florida. I live right in springs country, right in the middle of the highest density of water-filled caves in the United States and I get to go swim in the spring every morning.

As much as I treasure those wonderful exploration opportunities, I'm just as happy getting up in the morning and riding my bike across the street, swimming in the spring and free-diving with just a mask and no fins. I just love the water. Anything that gets me into it is great.

Q: Who is your employer?

A: I actually own my own independent production company. Most of the work I do is with Karst Productions, which makes a film series called We also do projects for and the Discovery Channel and even for Hollywood.

But I have some other crazy little offshoots as well. I do investigatory work for a legal film on underwater accidents, I write, I do a lot of photojournalism for magazines around the country ? not just diving magazines but other things as well ? and I still teach cave diving too. So it's quite a nice variety.

Q: What have you done for Hollywood?

A: Most recently there was a film called which is an action/thriller about a team of high- tech cave divers that get trapped in a cave and pursued by monsters. I directed the underwater unit for that film.

It was a big job, sort of an eight-month project between United States, Romania and Mexico, organising the filming of all the underwater aspects, training the cast and acting as a technical advisor through the whole film. It was a good, fun project.

Q: Did the actors know how to dive?

A: None of them knew how to dive. I met them in Hollywood and trained them. Only a couple of them actually even got to the level where they were properly certified divers so I had to create a way to film them as safely as possible.

We were using very high-tech gear ? we used the re-breathers. For most of them, the close-ups, any time you just see their face, it's the actor in about two feet of water on the re-breather. And then any time you see a whole body ? another one of my roles was as a stunt double. I doubled for all the men. I'm too big for Hollywood women.

Q: Future projects?

A: We've got a few things going. I'm finishing the editing of an Everglades documentary right now where we follow the path of water through the Everglades all the way up to the Gulf Stream. We've recently been approached to work on a 3D IMAX Everglades film as well as a 3D IMAX cave film so there's a couple of possibilities in the works.