Sixty-Nine Days Underground

On October 13, 2010, Mario Sepulveda stepped into a narrow metal capsule called the Phoenix, 2,300 feet beneath the Atacama Desert in Chile. For sixty-nine days, he and thirty-two other miners had been entombed in a collapsed copper mine that the world assumed would become their grave. Engineers said extraction was impossible. The rock was too unstable, the depth too great.…