Against the Odds

After the Wild Boars football team was found alive inside Tham Luang, rescuers faced a problem with no easy solution. Nearly two miles of difficult cave passages separated the group from safety, and significant sections were underwater. ([The Guardian][1]) Waiting for the water to disappear carried its own risks. Oxygen levels inside the cave had fallen, more rain could arrive, and on July sixth f...

For more than a week, rescuers pushed deeper into Thailand's flooded Tham Luang cave searching for twelve young football players and their assistant coach. On July second, twenty eighteen, British cave divers John Volanthen and Rick Stanton finally reached a chamber several kilometers inside the mountain. Their lights revealed all thirteen people alive. But the discovery did not end the crisis. Be...

On June twenty third, twenty eighteen, twelve members of the Wild Boars youth football team and their assistant coach entered Tham Luang cave in northern Thailand after football practice. When they failed to return home, bicycles and belongings found near the entrance revealed where they had gone. ([thailandcaves.shepton.org.uk][1]) Heavy rain sent water through the cave system and blocked the rou...

On April thirteenth, nineteen seventy, Apollo Thirteen was more than two hundred thousand miles from Earth when an oxygen tank exploded inside the spacecraft. Astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise suddenly lost much of the power, oxygen, and water they needed to survive. ([NASA][1]) The planned Moon landing was abandoned. The lunar module Aquarius became an emergency lifeboat, while...

In nineteen eighty five, British climbers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates reached the summit of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes after climbing its previously unclimbed west face. During the descent, Simpson fell and shattered his leg, turning an already dangerous climb into a survival crisis. ([The Guardian][1]) Yates tried to lower his injured partner down the mountain, but eventually found himsel...

In November nineteen twelve, fisherman José Salvador Alvarenga left the coast of Mexico in a small fiberglass boat with a young crewmate. A powerful storm disabled their journey, and the two men disappeared into the Pacific. Alvarenga would not reach land again for more than a year. ([The Guardian][1]) With no engine, almost no supplies, and no reliable source of fresh water, survival depended on...

On Christmas Eve in nineteen seventy one, seventeen year old Juliane Koepcke boarded LANSA Flight Five Zero Eight with her mother in Lima, Peru. During the flight, the aircraft entered a violent thunderstorm and broke apart over the Amazon rainforest. Juliane survived the fall and woke alone beneath the jungle canopy. ([The Washington Post][1]) Injured, without her glasses, and with almost no food...

“A Specimen, a Name, and the Ocean That Wouldn’t Let Go” explores how a single museum record can become the beginning of a deep-sea mystery. Through the specimen label, collection record, and taxonomic name of Psilaster charcoti, this episode looks beyond simple classification and into the afterlife of an Antarctic expedition. What survives in an archive is not only data, but fragments of discover...