44 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020
all at the same time. Theoretically, that
is possible. Theoretically.”
After a maintenance day, Lahey
offered to take John Ramsay to the bot-
tom of the trench. Ramsay was conflicted,
but, he said, “there was this sentiment
on board that if the designer doesn’t dare
get in it then nobody should dare get in
it.” He climbed in, and felt uncomfort-
able the entire way down. “It wasn’t that
I actually needed to have a shit, it was
this irrational fear of what happens if I
do need to have a shit,” he said.
Two days later, Vescovo took Jamie-
son to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
They returned with one of the deepest
rock samples ever collected, after Ves-
covo crashed into a boulder and a frag-
ment landed in a battery tray.
Buckle started sailing back to Guam,
to drop off Walsh, Vescovo, and the Tri-
ton crew. “It’s quite mind-blowing, when
you sit down and think about it, that,
from the dawn of time until this Mon-
day, there were three people who have
been down there,” he said. “Then, in the
last ten days, we’ve put five more people
down there, and it’s not even a big deal.”
I
t was early May, and there was only
one ocean left. But the deepest point
in the Arctic Ocean was covered by the
polar ice cap, and would remain so for
several months. The Pressure Drop
headed south, toward Tonga, in the South
Pacific. Bongiovanni kept the sonar run-
ning twenty-four hours a day, and Jamie-
son carried out the first-ever lander de-
ployments in the San Cristobal and Santa
Cruz Trenches. “The amphipod sam-
ples are mostly for genetic work, track-
ing adaptations,” he told me. The same
critters were showing up in trenches
thousands of miles apart—but aren’t
found in shallower waters, elsewhere on
the ocean floor. “How the fuck are they
going from one to another?”
Bongiovanni mapped the Tonga
Trench. The sonar image showed a forty-
mile line of fault escarpments, a geolog-
ical feature resulting from the fractur-
ing of an oceanic plate. “It’s horrendously
violent, but it’s happening over geolog-
ical time,” Jamieson explained. “As one
of the plates is being pushed down, it’s
cracking into these ridges, and these
ridges are fucking huge”—a mile and a
half, vertical. “If they were on land, they’d
be one of the wonders of the world. But,
because they’re buried under ten thou-
sand metres of water, they just look like
ripples in the ocean floor.”
Bongiovanni routinely stayed up all
night, debugging the new software and
surveying dive sites, so that the Limit-
ing Factor could be launched at dawn.
“Day Forever,” she dated one of her jour-
nal entries. “Sonar fucked itself.” Now,
before taking leave, she taught Erlend
Currie, who had launched Jamieson’s
makeshift lander in the Diamantina Frac-
ture Zone, how to operate the EM-124.
“When you give people more re-
sponsibility, they either crumble or they
bloom, and he blooms,” Buckle said. In
the next month, Currie mapped some
six thousand nautical miles of the ocean
floor, from the Tonga Trench to the
Panama Canal. “Erlend’s doing a good
job,” another officer reported to Bon-
giovanni. “He’s starting to really talk
like a mapper. He just hasn’t quite
learned how to drink like one.”
NORWEGIANCANDY
I
boarded the Pressure Drop in Ber-
muda, in the middle of July, seven
months into the expedition. The crew
had just completed another set of dives
in the Puerto Rico Trench, to demon-
strate the equipment to representatives
of the U.S. Navy and to the billionaire
and ocean conservationist Ray Dalio.
(Dalio owns two Triton submarines.)
Vescovo hoped to sell the hadal explo-
ration system for forty-eight million
dollars—slightly more than the total
cost of the expedition. During one of
the demonstrations, a guest engineer
began outlining all the ways he would
have done it differently. “O.K.,” McCal-
lum said, smiling. “But you didn’t.”
We set off north, through the tur-
quoise waters of the Gulf Stream. It
would take roughly three weeks, with-
out stopping, to reach the deepest point
in the Arctic Ocean. But the Arctic dive
window wouldn’t open for five more
weeks, and, as Vescovo put it, “the Ti-
tanic is on the way.” For several nights,
I stood on the bow, leaning over the
edge, mesmerized, as bioluminescent
plankton flashed green upon contact
with the ship. Above that, blackness,
until the horizon, where the millions of
stars began. Sometimes there was a crack
of lightning in the distance, breaking
through dark clouds. But most nights
the shape of the Milky Way was so pro-
nounced that in the course of the night
you could trace the earth’s rotation.
The air turned foggy and cold. Buckle
steered out of the Gulf Stream and into
the waters of the North Atlantic, a few
hundred miles southeast of the port of
St. John’s, Newfoundland. After mid-
“He’s anxious to resume perpetrating his usual activities.”
• •
