Joint expeditions performed by scientific scuba divers from MSC Basrah (Iraq) and SDC Freiberg (Germany) carried out in September 2012 and in May 2013, revealed the existence of a true live coral reef in Iraqi coastal waters for the first time ever.

The Iraqi coast at the northern end of the Persian Gulf is dominated by the large swampy river delta of the rivers Euphrates, Tigris and Karun, merging into the Shatt al-Arab that represents the main outflow in the Arabian/Persian Gulf.

At the beginning of World War I the German submarine U-26 disappeared without a trace.

On October 11, 1914, she sank the Russian cruiser Pallada inflicting the first loss of the war on the Russian navy. The boat did not return from sea in August 1915 and is assumed to have struck a mine or suffered a technical failure off the coast of Finland.

The Finnish group of divers who goes by the name Badewanne states on their website:

The animals tagged for this study exhibited profound diving capabilities; however, the dive depths and durations reported here far exceed the prior records for this species. The deepest dive of 2992 m.

Diel patterns in dive behaviour were strongly evident in this dataset, confirming previous observations from short overnight deployments that this whale spends significantly more time in waters above 50 m at night than they do during the day.