THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020 43
some specimens by the northern wall
of the trench, but they were too big to
carry, so he tried to break off a piece by
smashing them with the manipulator
arm—to no avail. “I finally resorted to
just burrowing the claw into the muck,
and just blindly grabbing and seeing if
anything came out,” he said. No luck.
He surfaced.
Hours later, Vescovo walked into the
control room and learned that one of
the navigation landers was stuck in the
silt. He was in despair. The lander’s bat-
teries would soon drain, killing all com-
munications and tracking—another
expensive item lost on the ocean floor.
“Well, you do have a full-ocean-depth
submersible” available to retrieve it,
McCallum said. Lahey had been plan-
ning to make a descent with Jonathan
Struwe, of the marine classification firm
DNV-GL, to certify the Limiting Fac-
tor. Now it became a rescue mission.
When Lahey reached the bottom,
he began moving in a triangular search
pattern. Soon he spotted a faint light
from the lander. He nudged it with the
manipulator arm, freeing it from the
mud. It shot up to the surface. Struwe—
who was now one of only six people
who had been to the bottom of the Chal-
lenger Deep—certified the Limiting
Factor’s “maximum permissible diving
depth” as “unlimited.”
The control room was mostly empty.
“When Victor first went down, every-
one was there, high-fiving and whoop-
ing and hollering,” Buckle said. “And
the next day, around lunchtime, every-
one went ‘Fuck this, I’ll go for lunch.’
Patrick retrieves a piece of equipment
from the deepest point on earth, and
it’s just me, going, ‘Yay, congratulations,
Patrick.’ No one seemed to notice how
big a deal it is that they had already
made this normal—even though it’s
not. It’s the equivalent of having a daily
flight to the moon.” McCallum, in his
pre-dive briefings, started listing “com-
placency” as a hazard.
Vescovo was elated when the lander
reached the surface. “Do you know what
this means?” McCallum said to him.
“Yeah, we got the three-hundred-
thousand-dollar lander back,” Ves-
covo said.
“Victor, you have the only vehicle in
the world that can get to the bottom of
any ocean, anytime, anywhere,” McCal-
lum said. The message sank in. Vescovo
had read that the Chinese government
has dropped acoustic surveillance de-
vices in and around the Mariana Trench,
apparently to spy on U.S. submarines
leaving the naval base in Guam; he could
damage them. A Soviet nuclear subma-
rine sank in the nineteen-eighties, near
the Norwegian coast. Russian and Nor-
wegian scientists have sampled the water
inside, and have found that it is highly
contaminated. Now Vescovo began to
worry that, before long, non-state actors
might be able to retrieve and repurpose
radioactive materials lying on the seafloor.
“I don’t want to be a Bond villain,”
Vescovo told me. But he noted how easy
it would be. “You could go around the
world with this sub, and put devices on
the bottom that are acoustically trig-
gered to cut cables,” he said. “And you
short all the stock markets and buy gold,
By the time the Pressure Drop reached the Arctic, it had completed one and a half laps around the world, to both poles.
ANUJ SHRESTHA
