It looked, for three breathtaking minutes, like a chain of bubbles rising straight out of the sea floor. Off the coast of India’s Andaman Islands on May 3, 2026, fourteen scuba divers locked themselves into a single vertical column 22.3 metres tall — and held it long enough for Guinness World Records to confirm a brand-new title: the tallest human stack ever assembled underwater.
The attempt took place in the warm, clear waters around Swaraj Dweep, the island formerly known as Havelock, in the Bay of Bengal. The 14 divers — a mix of Indian Navy officers, Andaman tourism instructors, and dive school staff — descended together to the ocean floor and then, one by one, climbed onto each other’s shoulders, fins clamped tightly against the diver below, until the chain stretched more than seven storeys high through the water column.
Guinness rules required the stack to remain stable for at least three minutes and to clearly clear a minimum height of 10 metres. The Andaman team didn’t just clear it; they more than doubled it, with adjudicator Rishi Nath confirming the 22.3-metre measurement on the spot.
“It was the calmest three minutes of my life,” one of the divers told local reporters after surfacing. “We had practised on land, in pools, in shallow water — but nothing prepares you for the moment you’re looking up and there are seven people standing on top of you in the open ocean.”
The record is the second underwater Guinness title the Andaman Islands have claimed in just two days. On May 2, the same dive community unfurled the largest national flag ever displayed underwater — a 100-square-metre Indian tricolor — in another carefully choreographed dive. Both records were ratified on site, an unusual move that reflects how rigorously the team had documented the attempts in advance.
More than 200 divers were involved across the two records, drawn from local dive operators, the Indian Navy, the Coast Guard, and visiting clubs from across India. The events were timed to coincide with the launch of a new diving tourism campaign for the islands, and Andaman officials have already credited the back-to-back records with a sharp uptick in inquiries from international dive travellers.
“This was about more than a record,” said an Andaman tourism official at a press conference following the dive. “It was about showing the world what our reefs and our community of divers can do when they work together.”
The technical challenge was substantial. Stacking divers vertically in open water is harder than it looks: each person has to fine-tune the air in their buoyancy compensator so that they neither sink nor float, while the diver above settles their weight on their shoulders. A single slip in buoyancy can collapse the chain in seconds. The team trained for months in shallow lagoons before attempting the full-height stack, building from groups of three, then five, then ten, and finally the full fourteen.
The waters around Swaraj Dweep made the challenge slightly easier — visibility on dive day exceeded 25 metres, and currents were gentle. But the divers still had to manage the differing pressures at the top and bottom of the column, equalising their ears and lungs as the stack rose and the bottom-most divers held their position against the increasing weight above.
Guinness has confirmed the team broke the previous record set by a Russian dive group in 2014, which stood at just over 10 metres. The Andaman attempt more than doubles that mark — a leap forward that, coupled with the new flag record, has put the islands firmly on the global underwater-feats map.
For the 14 divers, the celebration was relatively muted: a few cheers on the surface, hugs all around, and then back to their day jobs running dive boats, training students, and patrolling the reefs they call home. They had already started talking about the next record. “Bigger team next time,” one of them grinned. “Maybe we go for thirty.”
