36 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020
then a thousand. Electronic systems
failed. The hatch leaked. Emergency
lights malfunctioned, and drop weights
got stuck. Pre-dive checklists labelled
several switches “inoperable.” Post-dive
checklists noted critical components
lost and fallen to the seafloor.
“In a sea trial, you’re trying to break
stuff—you’re trying to work out where
your weakest link is,” McCal-
lum said. “It’s incredibly de-
moralizing. You never feel as
if you’re making any mean-
ingful forward progress.”
Each morning, he delivered
a pre-dive briefing to mem-
bers of the ship and subma-
rine crews. “Don’t be disheart-
ened by the long list of things
that broke,” he told them.
“Rejoice, because those are
things that are not going to fail in the
Southern Ocean—and if they did fail
in the Southern Ocean we’d be fucked.”
O
n September 9, 2018, Patrick Lahey
piloted the Limiting Factor to the
bottom of the Abaco Canyon, more
than three miles down. It was the ninth
time that the submersible had been in
the water. Everything worked. The next
day, Lahey repeated the dive, with Ves-
covo as the lead pilot. When they
reached the bottom, Vescovo turned on
the control unit that directs the manip-
ulator arm. Something wasn’t right. He
and Lahey glanced at each other. “Do
you smell that?” Lahey asked.
“Yes.”
There was a puff of smoke in the
capsule. Vescovo and Lahey grabbed
the “spare air”—scuba regulators, with
two-minute compressed-air cannis-
ters—so that they wouldn’t pass out
while preparing the emergency breath-
ing apparatus. A circuit breaker tripped,
automatically switching off the control
unit for the manipulator arm, and the
acrid smell dissipated. Lahey, who was
training Vescovo to handle crises un-
derwater, asked what they should do.
“Abort the dive?” Vescovo said.
“Yes.” They were two hours from
the surface.
Ramsay and Tom Blades, Triton’s chief
electrical designer, had devised numer-
ous safety mechanisms. Most systems
were duplicated, and ran on separate elec-
trical circuits, in case one of the batter-
ies failed. The thrusters could be ejected
if they became entangled; so could the
batteries, to drop weight and provide
buoyancy. The five-hundred-and-fifty-
pound surfacing weight was attached by
an electromagnet, so that if the sub lost
electricity it would immediately begin its
ascent. There was also a dead-man switch:
an alarm went off if the pilot failed to
check in with the ship, and
if he failed to acknowledge
the alarm the weights would
automatically drop.
“Whenever we had any
significant failure of some
kind, the only thing that
mattered was why,” Vescovo
said. “If you can identify the
problem, and fix it, what are
you going to do? Give up?
Come on. That didn’t even
cross my mind. Maybe other people get
freaked out. I’ve heard of that happen-
ing. But if you’re mountain climbing and
you fall, are you not going to climb again?
No. You learn from it, and keep going.”
By the middle of September, the sea
trials had given way to “advanced sea
trials”—a euphemism to cover for the
fact that nothing was working. The Arc-
tic Ocean dive window had already
passed. Buckle was especially concerned
about the launch-and-recovery system.
The cranes were inadequate, and poorly
spaced. One of the support vessels, which
had been selected by Triton, was eigh-
teen years old, and its rubber perime-
ter was cracking from years of neglect
in the Florida sun. “I was pretty pissed
off at that point,” Buckle told me. “I
had put my guys in a difficult situation,
because they were trying to compen-
sate for structural issues that you couldn’t
really work around. You can only piss
with the dick you’ve been given.”
McCallum redesigned the expedi-
tion schedule to begin with the Puerto
Rico Trench, in the Atlantic Ocean, in
December, followed by Antarctica, in
early February. The adjustment added
cost but bought time.
W
hen Alan Jamieson, the expe-
dition’s chief scientist, contacted
Heather Stewart, a marine geologist
with the British Geological Survey,
and told her that Vescovo wanted to
dive to the deepest point of each ocean,
she replied that there was a problem:
nobody knew where those points were.
Most maps showing the ocean floor
in detail are commissioned by people
looking to exploit it. The oil-and-gas and
deep-sea-mining industries require ex-
tensive knowledge, and they pay for it.
But, with a few exceptions, the charac-
teristics of the deepest trenches are largely
unknown. As recently as the nineteen-
sixties, ocean depths were often estimated
by throwing explosives over the side of a
ship and measuring the time it took for
the boom to echo back from the bottom.
It may appear as if the trenches are
mapped—you can see them on Goo-
gle Earth. But these images weren’t gen-
erated by scanning the bottom of the
ocean; they come from satellites scan-
ning the top. The surface of the ocean
is not even—it is shaped by the features
beneath it. Trenches create mild surface
depressions, while underwater moun-
tain ranges raise the surface. The result
is a vaguely correct reading—here is a
trench!—with a ludicrous margin of
error. Every pixel is about five hundred
metres wide, and what lies below may
be thousands of feet deeper or shallower
than the satellite projects, and miles
away from where it appears on the map.
Vescovo would have to buy a multi-
beam echo sounder, an advanced sonar
mapping system, to determine precise
depths and dive locations. He chose
the Kongsberg EM-124, which would
be housed in a massive gondola under-
neath the ship. No other system could
so precisely map hadal depths. Ve scovo’s
purchase was the very first—serial num-
ber 001.
That November, Buckle sailed the
Pressure Drop to Curaçao, off the coast
of Venezuela, to have the EM-124 and
a new starboard crane installed. But
there was still no time to order a man-
rated A-frame—its purchase, delivery,
and installation would require that they
miss the Antarctic dive window, add-
ing a year to the expedition. “He’s a
wealthy dude, but he’s not like Paul Allen
or Ray Dalio,” Buckle said of Vescovo.
“He hasn’t got that kind of money. This
is a huge commitment of his resources.”
Stewart prepared a list of possible
dive locations, which earned her a spot
on the expedition. For others, partici-
pation was largely a matter of luck.
Shane Eigler had started working at
Triton the previous year, after Kelvin
