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.

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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.

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In January of 1915 the Endurance was frozen into the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, within sight of a continent she never reached. Nine months later the ice crushed her and she went to the bottom, leaving twenty-eight men standing on a drifting sheet of frozen sea, three hundred and fifty miles from the nearest land, which was uninhabited. No radio could reach anyone. Nobody knew where they were. There was no search to suspend, because there was nowhere to begin. They came home because one of them got into a twenty-two-foot boat and went to find help himself. This episode also covers the Ross Sea party — the other half of this expedition, stranded on the far side of the continent, and the three men who died there, who are almost never mentioned in the retelling.

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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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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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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.

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On Christmas Eve of 1971, LANSA Flight 508 flew into a line of thunderstorms over the Peruvian Amazon and came apart at twenty-one thousand feet. Ninety-two people were aboard. Juliane Koepcke, seventeen years old, fell from the sky still belted into her row of seats and woke the next day on the forest floor with a broken collarbone and one eye swollen shut. She walked for eleven days. What got her out was not luck — it was one piece of advice from her father, a zoologist, given casually years earlier: if you are ever lost, find running water and follow it. This episode also covers what the search found, what it found too late, and the fourteen people who survived the crash and were still alive on the ground when the looking stopped.

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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.

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