Sixty-Nine Days Without the Sun

On August 5, 2010, seven hundred thousand tons of rock collapsed inside the San Jose copper mine in Chile's Atacama Desert, trapping thirty-three miners half a mile underground. For seventeen days, nobody on the surface knew if they were alive. The men rationed two spoonfuls of tuna every forty-eight hours. They wept in the dark. They prayed. They scratched messages on scraps of paper no one could read.…