May 18, 2020 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week (and maybe Pick of the Year) is Ben Taub’s masterly “Five Oceans, Five Deeps.” What a piece of writing! It’s an exhilarating account of an exploration team that builds an amazing one-of-a-kind submersible, named the Limiting Factor, and pilots it to the bottom of the world’s deepest ocean trenches.

Of its many pleasures – superb description (“Now, as snow blew sideways in the darkness and the wind, he threw a grappling hook over the South Sandwich Trench and caught a lander thrashing in the waves”), vivid figuration (“At the bottom of the deepest trench, every square inch would have to hold back sixteen thousand pounds of water – an elephant standing on a stiletto heel”), arresting details (“They are ancient, insect-like scavengers, whose bodies accommodate the water – floating organs in a waxy exoskeleton”) – the most piquant for me is the contrast between the “misfit” characterization of the team (“ ‘a proper band of thieves,’ as the expedition’s chief scientist put it—with backgrounds in logistics, engineering, academia, and petty crime”) and its amazing ingenuity. For example, when the Limiting Factor’s manipulator arm fell off during a test dive, and the mission was in danger of being called off, Tom Blades, the team’s chief electrical officer, noted

that the loss of the manipulator arm had freed up an electrical junction box, creating an opportunity to fix nearly everything else that was wrong with the electronics. “Basically, Tom Blades hot-wired the sub,” Lahey explained. “There was literally a jumper cable running through the pressure hull, tucked behind Victor’s seat.”

And when the team lost two of its landers (“large, unmanned contraptions with baited traps and cameras, dropped over the side of a ship”), Alan Jamieson, the team’s chief scientist, “cobbled together a new lander out of aluminum scraps, spare electronics, and some ropes and buoys.”

Those are just two examples of the team’s creative responses to the mission’s numerous setbacks.

Reading “Five Oceans, Five Deeps,” I was in awe of the way Taub put me right there with Vescovo inside the Limiting Factor as he explores the bottom of, first, the Puerto Rico Trench, then the South Sandwich Trench, then the Java Trench, then the Mariana Trench, and, finally, Molloy Hole, in the Arctic. It’s an epic journey. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Postscript: I want to compliment The New Yorker on the wonderful job it did illustrating “Five Oceans, Five Deeps.” The online version is a lavish photo text, with pictures by Paolo Pellegrin and illustrations by Anuj Shrestha. Pellegrin’s photo of the Limiting Factor in its custom-built cradle on board the Pressure Drop allows me to appreciate the aptness of Taub’s “bulging briefcase” description of it.

Paolo Pellegrin, "Limiting Factor"