On the fifth of August, 2010, a block of rock estimated at seven hundred thousand tonnes sheared off inside the San José copper mine in northern Chile and sealed the only vehicle route to the surface. Thirty-three men were two thousand three hundred feet below it. They climbed into the ventilation shafts looking for the escape route the mine had been legally required to provide, and found bare rock where the ladders should have been. Then they went back down, divided food meant for a few days among thirty-three men, and waited in the dark. Eight boreholes missed. On the twenty-second of August the ninth broke through, and when the drill string came up there was a note on it in red paint: we are well in the refuge, the thirty-three. That was day seventeen of sixty-nine. This episode is mostly about the other fifty-two — and about what happened to these men after a billion people stopped watching.

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In November of 1912 Douglas Mawson left Cape Denison — by measurement the windiest place at sea level on Earth — with two men, two sledges and seventeen dogs, to map two thousand miles of Antarctic coastline nobody had charted. Six weeks and three hundred miles out, Belgrave Ninnis went through a bridged crevasse with the sledge carrying most of the food, all of the dog food, the tent and the spare clothing. Mawson and Xavier Mertz turned for home with about a week and a half of rations between them and began eating the dogs. Mertz died in the tent on the eighth of January, 1913. Mawson cut his sledge in half with a pocket knife and walked the last hundred miles alone, with the soles of his feet detached and bound back on with bandages. This episode includes the question about that walk that has never been settled — and states plainly what evidence there is and isn't.

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On the thirteenth of October, 1972, a Fairchild carrying forty-five people — most of them connected to an amateur rugby club from Montevideo — struck a ridge in the Andes and broke apart at around eleven and a half thousand feet. Search aircraft flew for eight days, from a position report that was wrong, looking for a white fuselage lying on snow. On the twenty-first of October the survivors heard on a transistor radio that the search had been suspended. One of them reportedly called it good news, because it meant they now knew they would have to get out themselves. Twenty-nine died on that mountain — in the crash, in an avalanche seventeen days later, and of injury and exposure. Sixteen came home. The survivors have spent fifty years correcting the way this story gets told, and this episode tells it their way: forty-five people, of whom sixteen came back.

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