[6] In 1991, Heinerth quit her office job and moved to the Cayman Islands to dive full-time, honing skills in underwater photography.

[5] Heinerth has written opinion pieces and articles about exploration and climate change for global publications including the Los Angeles Times.

[16][17] In August 2022, Heinerth led a team of expeditionary technical divers who confirmed and photographed a lost, sunken WWII bomber at the bottom of Gander Lake in Newfoundland.

[18] Heinerth was a member of a Royal Canadian Geographical Society team that discovered the wreckage of the Quest, the polar exploration vessel of the Shackleton–Rowett Expedition of 1921–1922 on which Sir Ernest Shackleton died in 1922.The wreck was found in 390 metres of water on the seabed of the Labrador Sea roughly 80 km off Labrador's coast, sitting almost upright, and appearing to be broadly intact.

[19] Jill Heinerth is the subject of the award-winning feature documentary film Diving Into The Darkness, produced by Running Cloud Productions and directed by Nays Baghai.

[21][1] In April 2007,[21] she married her second husband, writer, photographer, and new media expert Robert McClellan,[2] with whom she lives in Carleton Place, Ontario, Canada.

[26] Heinerth is a member of the Explorers Club, a fellow of the National Speleological Society, and she has been inducted into the Women Divers Hall of Fame.

[28] In January 2017, the Academy of Underwater Arts and Sciences announced that Jill Heinerth was to become a 2017 AUAS Fellow by receiving an NOGI Award for ‘Sports & Education’.