6 Awesome Atolls for Scuba Diving

Earth’s fiery volcanic past billions of years ago gave rise to some of the planet’s best diving today — including amazing coral atolls that you'll have to see to believe. An atoll is a seamount that grew into an island, developed a ring of coral around its waterline, then eroded below the water’s surface, leaving the circular reef intact with a shallow lagoon in the middle.

Clipperton Atoll
French Territory
Little-known Clipperton Atoll is an oddity given its location in the eastern Pacific. It’s located about 600 miles southeast of Socorro Island, and though it’s closest to Mexico, the barren, uninhabited island is a territory of France. It’s also not technically an atoll, even though it looks like one, because the lagoon is stagnant fresh water rather than seawater. Few divers have visited Clipperton, but the liveaboard Nautilus Explorer has begun offering trips here along with the Socorro Islands. The low-lying island has a barrier reef that drops to about 175 feet deep and is home to an endemic species, the Clipperton angelfish, and sees visits from sharks and rays.

Fakarava
French Polynesia
Fakarava is the quintessential atoll: A ring of reef topped by white sands and coconut palms, with a lake-calm saltwater lagoon in the volcano’s crater and deep-blue South Pacific waters on the outside. The lagoon is the second largest in the remote Tuamotu Islands of French Polynesia, and the entire atoll is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Divers can hit the water at Tumakohua Pass, a narrow channel connecting the ocean to the lagoon where the tidal exchange creates a screaming-fast, 4-knot drift dive. Divers start in the open sea and swim toward the mouth of the pass, right into a veritable wall of reef sharks that hang out at the mouth of the channel. The flow takes you through the channel, sweeping past vibrant coral walls packed with Napoleon wrasse, before popping you out the other side in the calm waters of the lagoon.

Turneffe Atoll
Belize
The Caribbean Sea atoll formations in Belize are the only ones in the Western Hemisphere, but they didn’t form around volcanic islands like those in the Pacific. These unique atolls are karst limestone structures shaped by the rise and fall of sea levels during the last ice age. The result was a handful of atoll-like structures like Turneffe Atoll, which comprises numerous small islands around a shallow lagoon, with steep drop-offs on the outside. Turneffe Atoll sits in the open ocean, on the outer edge of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, where large pelagics such as jacks cruise in from deeper water. At its current-swept southern tip, the Elbow is a favorite wall dive, where divers can find seasonal aggregations of snapper and grouper. And throughout the protected atoll, divers enjoy encounters with turtles, rays and eels.

Ari Atoll
Maldives
The entire Maldives island chain is perched atop the peaks of submarine volcanoes in the Chagos-Laccadive Ridge, which stretches north to south across the Indian Ocean. These volcanic peaks accumulated coral reefs around their shores, then slowly eroded away, leaving a chain of atolls behind. The abundant reef structures and remote ocean location make the Maldives one of the most sought-after diving destinations in the world. And Ari Atoll — one of the country’s 26 natural atolls — is a great place to start. It comprises dozens of small islands with numerous distinct reefs creating bommies, pinnacles and barrier formations where divers can find a multitude of big animals, including manta rays and whale sharks. “Ari Atoll has some of the greatest channel dives; there are frequent shark and big-fish sightings,” says Angela Gitaprasaka, dive manager for the Four Seasons Resort Maldives. “Some of the underwater pinnacles there are flourishing with soft corals and an abundance of fish, though strong currents can make the dives challenging.”

Tubbataha
Philippines
The remote Tubbataha Reefs in the Philippines’ Sulu Sea are true atolls, formerly the peaks of volcanoes along the undersea Cagayan Ridge. The Tubbataha region is both a national park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, accessible only by liveaboard during the March-to-June dive season. Diving at Tubbataha offers a vast buffet of everything the Coral Triangle has to offer, from steep walls and bluewater dives with sharks and schooling barracuda to shipwrecks and macro diving with tiny critters like pygmy seahorses and ghost pipefish. At the renowned Shark Airport dive site, on the North Atoll, a shallow plateau drops into the blue at 80 feet, where whitetip reef sharks cruise the ledge among jacks, rainbow runners and sea turtles. And lava formations dominate the scenery at Black Rock, with huge Napoleon wrasse poking around for crabs and sea urchins.

Bikini Atoll
Marshall Islands
Bikini Atoll’s name recognition comes not from its pristine reefs but from the United States using the island for nuclear-bomb testing, along with the Castle Bravo hydrogen-bomb test. Bikini Atoll’s remote location and the deep-water lagoon inside the atoll made it an ideal spot to test the effects of these bombs on warships. And to this day, the lagoon holds a stunning collection of wreck dives, including the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga and the Japanese battleship HIJMS Nagato. It was only in 1996 that the radiation levels dropped enough to allow divers to finally visit these wrecks.