THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020 41
out what the drift was, and we then
sailed in that drift direction for another
three or four hours, with all my guys
on the bridge—searchlights, binocu-
lars, everyone looking for it. And we
just never found it.”
The second one surfaced later that
night. But during the recovery it was
sucked under the pitching ship and
went straight through the propeller. By
now, there was a blizzard, and the ship
was heaving in eighteen-foot waves. “I
lost everything—just fucking every-
thing—in one night,” Jamieson said.
Vescovo suggested naming the site of
the lost landers the Bitter Deep.
The Pressure Drop set off east, past
a thirty-mile-long iceberg, for Cape
Town, South Africa, to stop for fuel
and food. Bongiovanni left the sonar
running, collecting data that would
correct the depths and the locations of
key geological features, whose prior
measurements by satellites were off by
as much as several miles. (Vescovo is
making all of the ship’s data available
to Seabed2030, a collaborative project
to map the world’s oceans in the next
ten years.) Meanwhile, Jamieson cob-
bled together a new lander out of alu-
minum scraps, spare electronics, and
some ropes and buoys, and taught Er-
lend Currie, the sailor from the Ork-
ney Islands, to bait it and set the re-
lease timer. Jamieson named the lander
the Erlander, then he disembarked and
set off for England, to spend time with
his wife and children. It would take
several weeks for the ship to reach its
next port stop, in Perth, where the Tri-
ton crew would install a new manipu-
lator arm.
At the time, the deepest point in
the Indian Ocean was unknown. Most
scientists believed that it was in the
Java Trench, near Indonesia. But no-
body had ever mapped the northern
part of the Diamantina Fracture Zone,
off the coast of Australia, and readings
from satellites placed it within Java’s
margin of error.
The Pressure Drop spent three days
over the Diamantina; Bongiovanni
confirmed that it was, in fact, shallower
than Java, and Currie dropped the Er-
lander as Jamieson had instructed.
When it surfaced, around ten hours
later—the trap filled with amphipods,
including several new species—Currie
became the first person to collect a bi-
ological sample from the Diamantina
Fracture Zone.PIRATES
T
he Java Trench lies in international
waters, which begin twelve nautical
miles from land. But the expedition’s pro-
spective dive sites fell within Indonesia’s
Exclusive Economic Zone; according to
U.N. conventions, a coun-
try has special rights to the
exploration and exploitation
of marine resources, as far
as two hundred nautical
miles from the coast. Mc-
Callum had spent much of
the previous year applying
for permits and permissions;
he dealt with fifty-seven
government agencies, from
more than a dozen coun-
tries, in order to plan the Five Deeps.
For several months, the Indonesian
government ignored McCallum’s inqui-
ries. Then he was bounced among ten or
more agencies, to which he sent briefing
materials about the submersible, the ship,
the crew, and the mission. Between the
Atlantic and the Antarctic dives, Vescovo
flew to Jakarta to deliver a lecture, and
he offered to bring an Indonesian scien-
tist to the bottom of the trench. But when
the ship arrived in Bali McCallum still
hadn’t received permission to dive.
Officially, this meant that the team
could not carry out any scientific work
in the Java Trench. But the international
law of the sea allows for the testing of
equipment, and, after Java, the next set
of dives, in the Pacific Ocean, would be
the deepest of all. “So we tested the sub
a few times,” McCallum said, smiling.
“We tested the landers, we tested the
sonar—we tested everything.”
The Java Trench is more than two
thousand miles long, and the site of vio-
lent seismic activity. Surveys in the north-
ern part show evidence of landslides, from
the 2004 earthquake that triggered a tsu-
nami with hundred-foot waves that killed
a quarter of a million people across South-
east Asia. Farther south, satellites had de-
tected two deep pools, several hundred
miles apart. The Pressure Drop mapped
both sites, and Bongiovanni discovered
that, in fact, the deepest point was be-
tween them, in a small pool that had pre-viously gone unnoticed. It may be a new
rupture in the ocean floor.
Buckle positioned the Pressure Drop
over the pool, and turned off the ship’s
tracking and communications equipment.
McCallum hoisted a pirate flag. The cli-
mate was tropical, eighty-six degrees, the
ocean calm, with slow, rolling swells and
hardly a ripple on the surface. On the
morning of April 5, 2019, the Triton crew
launched the Limiting Factor without
incident, and Vescovo dived
to the deepest point in the
Java Trench.
Mountaineers stand atop
craggy peaks and look out
on the world. Vescovo de-
scended into blackness, and
saw mostly sediment at the
bottom. The lights on the
Limiting Factor illuminated
only a few feet forward; the
acrylic viewports are convex
and eight inches thick. Whatever the true
topography of the rock underneath, hadal
trenches appear soft and flat at the deep
spots. Flip a mountain upside down and,
with time, the inverted summit will be
unreachable; for as long as there has been
an ocean, the trenches have been the end
points of falling particulate—volcanic dust,
sand, pebbles, meteorites, and “the bil-
lions upon billions of tiny shells and skel-
etons, the limy or silicious remains of all
the minute creatures that once lived in the
upper waters,” Rachel Carson wrote, in
“The Sea Around Us,” in 1951. “The sed-
iments are a sort of epic poem of the earth.”
Vescovo spent three hours at the bot-
tom, and saw a plastic bag through the
viewports. In the Puerto Rico Trench,
one of the Limiting Factor’s cameras had
captured an image of a soda can. Scien-
tists estimate that in thirty years the oceans
will hold a greater mass of plastic than
of fish. Almost every biological sample
that Jamieson has dredged up from the
hadal zone and tested in a lab has been
contaminated with microplastics. “Does
it harm the ability of these animals to
feed, to maneuver, to reproduce?” Mc-
Callum said. “We don’t know, because
we can’t compare one that’s full of mi-
croplastics with one that’s not. Because
there aren’t any.”
The walls of trenches are filled with
life, but they were not Vescovo’s mission.
“It’s a little bit like going to the Louvre,
putting your running shoes on, and