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.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In the early hours of the twenty-sixth of May, 2013, the anchor-handling tug Jascon-4 lost stability in heavy swell in the Gulf of Guinea and rolled. She sank stern-first and came to rest upside down in a hundred feet of water. Eleven of the twelve men aboard drowned. Harrison Okene, the ship's cook, was in the toilet when she went over — which is the specific reason he lived. He found a four-foot air pocket in an inverted cabin, got onto a mattress, and sat in salt water to his chest in complete darkness for close to sixty hours. Two and a half days later a commercial diving team arrived to recover the bodies. This episode covers the physics that kept him alive, the carbon dioxide that was hours from killing him, and the decision a dive supervisor made in seconds that stopped the rescue from killing him on the way up.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In November of 1942 the German submarine U-172 put two torpedoes into the SS Benlomond in the South Atlantic. She went down in about two minutes. Fifty-five of the fifty-six people aboard died, most of them when the boilers went. Poon Lim, a twenty-four-year-old second steward from Hainan Island, got onto a wooden float roughly eight feet square and stayed on it for a hundred and thirty-three days. He bent a fish hook from the wiring inside a torch, unpicked rope for line, dried his catch in strips in the sun, and collected rainwater in an emptied biscuit tin. Two ships saw him and did not stop. This episode explains why — and why the Royal Navy took his account apart before they believed it. The record has not been broken in more than eighty years.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In 1921 the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson decided that Wrangel Island, ninety miles off the Siberian coast, ought to belong to Britain or Canada. Neither government had asked him to. He sent four young men north with six months of supplies, on the published theory that the Arctic was a friendly place that would feed a competent man. He did not go himself. The fifth member of the party was Ada Blackjack, a twenty-three-year-old Iñupiaq seamstress hired to make the skin clothing that would keep the others alive. She took the job because it paid fifty dollars a month and her son was in an orphanage. Nobody had thought to ask whether the seamstress could shoot. The relief ship could not get through the ice in 1922. This episode is about the second year, and about what she taught herself to do when there was nobody else left to do it.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On the twenty-third of June, 2018, twelve boys aged eleven to sixteen and their twenty-five-year-old assistant coach rode their bicycles to the Tham Luang cave in northern Thailand after football practice. They went in intending to stay about an hour. It rained earlier in the season than expected and harder than forecast, and the water rose in the passages behind them. For nine days nobody knew whether they were alive. Then two British cave divers — a retired firefighter and an IT consultant, working in visibility measured in centimetres with one hand on a guideline — surfaced in a chamber two and a half miles inside the mountain and found all thirteen sitting on a mud bank. That was the easy part. The plan to get them out involved sedating children and carrying them unconscious through flooded passage, and the men who designed it did not believe all of them would live.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Fifty-five hours and fifty-five minutes into the flight, roughly two hundred thousand miles out, John Swigert flipped a switch to stir the cryogenic oxygen tanks. Ninety-five seconds later there was a bang, and most of the side of the service module was gone. No oxygen meant no fuel cells. No fuel cells meant no power, no water, and no way to trust the main engine. Getting three men home meant swinging around the far side of the Moon rather than turning back, and using the lunar module Aquarius — built for two men and forty-five hours — to keep three alive for ninety. Jim Lovell's own summary of it has never changed: they did not save themselves. A very large number of people on the ground did the arithmetic, and the crew flew what they were told.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.