When I was a child, I saw a cartoon where a polar bear was climbing a buoy. The buoy was like any other tethered underwater with a chain. Just thinking about this fact drove me crazy. Why would the polar bear climb it? Is he not afraid? I could not imagine ­getting close to that buoy myself. Only a year ago, I learned why. The fear of human-made ­objects submerged in water is called submechanophobia.

I learned about it on Reddit. The subreddit r/submechanophobia is a collection of images that trigger something in me—a feeling somewhere between trepidation, anxiety and fascination. These images show a variety of different submerged ­human-made objects: Wrecks, ­infrastructure like the legs of oil rigs, ship propellers, submarines as well as chains. Chains underwater freak me out. Chains of anchors, chains of machines, or chains of buoys. The images of these chains are the most intense ones, they have the strongest effect on me.

When I was a child, I saw a cartoon where a polar bear was climbing a buoy. The buoy was like any other tethered underwater with a chain. Just thinking about this fact drove me crazy. Why would the polar bear climb it? Is he not afraid? I could not imagine ­getting close to that buoy myself. Only a year ago, I learned why. The fear of human-made ­objects submerged in water is called submechanophobia.

I learned about it on Reddit. The subreddit r/submechanophobia is a collection of images that trigger something in me—a feeling somewhere between trepidation, anxiety and fascination. These images show a variety of different submerged ­human-made objects: Wrecks, ­infrastructure like the legs of oil rigs, ship propellers, submarines as well as chains. Chains underwater freak me out. Chains of anchors, chains of machines, or chains of buoys. The images of these chains are the most intense ones, they have the strongest effect on me.