.bentaub91’s 2020 report on a team of deep-sea explorers as they set one of the last meaningful records on earth: a journey around the world and to both poles to reach the bottom of all five oceans.
Sea level—perpetual flux. There is a micromillimetre on the surface of the ocean that moves between sea and sky and is simultaneously both and neither. Every known life-form exists in relation to this layer. Above it, the world of land, air, sunlight, and lungs. Below it, the world of water, depth, and pressure. The deeper you go, the darker, the more hostile, the less familiar, the less measured, the less known.
The submersible dropped at a rate of about two and a half feet per second. Twenty minutes into the dive, the pilot reached the midnight zone, where dark waters turn black. The only light is the dim glow of bioluminescence—from electric jellies, camouflaged shrimp, and toothy predators with natural lanterns to attract unwitting prey. Some fish in these depths have no eyes—what use are they? There is little to eat.
The submarine touched the silty bottom, and the pilot, a fifty-three-year-old Texan named Victor Vescovo, became the first living creature with blood and bones to reach the deepest point in the Tonga Trench. He was piloting the only submersible that can bring a human to that depth: his own. Vescovo’s crew was an unlikely assemblage—“a proper band of thieves,” as the expedition’s chief scientist put it—with backgrounds in logistics, engineering, academia, and petty crime. Some on board had spent decades at sea; others were landlubbers. For more than a year, they faced challenges as timeless as bad weather and as novel as the equipment they had invented for the job.
But every age of exploration runs its course. “When Shackleton sailed for the Antarctic in 1914, he could still be a hero. When he returned in 1917 he could not,” Fergus Fleming writes, in his introduction to “,” Ernest Shackleton’s diary. “The concept of heroism evaporated in the trenches of the First World War.” While Shackleton was missing in Antarctica, a member of his expedition cabled for help.
In 1983, when he was twenty-one, he carried out his first submarine dive, to fourteen hundred feet, to inspect an oil rig off the coast of Northern California. He was profoundly affected by the experience—to go deep one hour and surface the next, with “none of the punitive decompression,” he said. By the time Vescovo contacted him, Lahey had piloted more than sixty submersibles on several thousand dives.
“I never really had a particular passion for submarines,” Ramsay, who is Triton’s chief submarine designer, told me. “I still don’t, really.” What he does love is that he gets to design every aspect of each machine, from the central frame to the elegant handle on the back of the hatch. Car manufacturers have entire teams design a seat or a fender, and then produce it at scale.
Ramsay settled on titanium: malleable and resistant to corrosion, with a high ratio of strength to density. The pressure hull would weigh nearly eight thousand pounds. It would have to be counterbalanced by syntactic foam, a buoyant filler comprising millions of hollow glass spheres. For the submarine to stay upright, the foam would have to go above the hull, providing upward lift—like a hot-air balloon, for water.
The rest of the expedition team was on a ship docked in the harbor at Vero Beach, waiting. Vescovo remained at home in Dallas, training on a simulator that Triton had rigged up in his garage. On Lahey’s recommendation, he had hired Rob McCallum, an expedition leader and a co-founder ofFor every Vescovo who goes to the South Pole, there is a McCallum making sure he stays alive.
The Arctic-dive window was fast approaching, and it seemed unlikely that the submersible would be ready. “That’s when Patrick Lahey’s overflowing optimism went from being an incredible, endearing personality trait to being a huge issue,” Stuart Buckle, the Pressure Drop’s captain, said. “Every day, Patrick would say, ‘Oh, yes, it’ll be ready in one or two days.’ And then two days pass, and he’d say, ‘It’ll be ready in two days.
Buckle, the captain, dropped anchor near Great Abaco Island, in the Bahamas, and immediately became alarmed by the Triton crew’s cavalier approach to safety. He had grown up in the Scottish Highlands, and gone to sea when he was seventeen years old. “Me and my guys were trying to adjust from the oil-and-gas industry, where you need a signed bit of paper to do anything, and to go out on deck you have to have your overalls, hard hats, goggles, earmuffs, and gloves,” Buckle said.
Other incidents were unambiguous. “I was seeing Triton guys bouncing up the ladders without holding the handrails, wanting to jump on top of things while they were still swinging from the crane,” Buckle recalled. Ropes failed, deck equipment snapped under stress. “One of the big ratchet hooks blew off the top of the hangar, and missed Patrick’s head by that much,” McCallum said, holding his fingers a couple of inches apart. “Just missed him.
On 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 Vescovo as the lead pilot. When they reached the bottom, Vescovo turned on the control unit that directs the manipulator arm. Something wasn’t right. He and Lahey glanced at each other. “Do you smell that?” Lahey asked.
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 Arctic 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 eighteen years old, and its rubber perimeter was cracking from years of neglect in the Florida sun.
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