Like Woolley’s plan, the difference between theoretically possible and technically viable soon became clear. After six years of preparation, the Glomar arrived at the wreck site on July 4, 1974. The first mishap occurred several days later, when the crew spotted a missile-tracking Soviet ship approaching. The Russian ship, the Chazhma, radioed the Glomar.

  “What are you doing here?” the Russians asked.

  The Glomar responded, “We are conducting mining tests—deep-ocean mining tests.”

  “What kind of vessel are you?”

  “Deep-ocean mining vessel,” the Americans said.

  “How long will you be here?”

  “Two or three weeks?”

  Five minutes of tense silence passed. Everyone on board the Glomar wondered if their cover had been blown. Further interrogation might have revealed the true nature of the equipment on board, or, worse, being watched would have nixed the chance to activate the Glomar’s intricate underbelly.

  Finally the Chazhma, largely appeased and low on provisions, radioed back, “We wish you all the best.”

  Several days later, the descent went as planned. The crew watched on closed-circuit television and marveled at the richly detailed crabs and fish they could see around the wreck. The anchoring and clamping of the claw proceeded smoothly, surpassing the most difficult phase of the mission.

  During the lift, however, when the submarine was a third of the way up and had ascended more than a mile, the video feed went black. When it was restored, the camera that had previously been pointed at the submarine now showed nothing but water. The front thirty-eight feet of the submarine was still in the claw, but the rear one hundred feet had fallen back to the seafloor. The lift continued on the front half, which arrived minutes later on the surface. It contained the bodies of six Soviet crew members (who were subsequently buried at sea in metal coffins) and two nuclear torpedoes, code books, sonar equipment, and navigational documents.

  The mixed success of the operation might have spurred a second attempt to recover the fallen section, if not for an odd turn of events. While the Glomar and its crew planned a return mission, burglars with no knowledge or apparent interest in the Glomar broke into the headquarters of one of the shipping contractors in Los Angeles and stole documents, including one tying Howard Hughes to the CIA. The FBI was assigned to recover the document, which later turned out not to be among the stolen documents and was found by a security guard. But it was too late. Word spread to several investigative journalists, who broke the story in the Los Angeles Times on February 8, 1975. The Nixon administration denied the story, but the Soviets weren’t swayed, and they deployed a ship to sit atop the recovery site. William Colby, the director of Central Intelligence, tried to suppress further reporting on account of national security against America’s greatest foe. But a well-known muckraking radio journalist named Jack Anderson wasn’t convinced. Navy sources told Anderson that the operation yielded no actionable secrets and was mostly a waste. Later, on his radio show, Anderson called the billion-dollar operation a government “boondoggle” and said taxpayers deserved to know about it.

  What would it take for a government-sponsored salvage operation to be supported by the general public? America got its answer a decade later in a disaster eerily similar to the Titanic’s. In a parallel tragedy that involved overextended new technology, the death of a cross section of humanity, and the disastrous effects of ice, the Challenger space shuttle exploded one minute after its launch over Florida in 1986 and fell, like the Titanic, to the floor of the Atlantic.

  By the time the first replays of the explosion were airing on television, NASA already had a plan to salvage the components of the shuttle. And a week later, the U.S. military and NASA commenced a four-month-long, around-the-clock search of a four-hundred-twenty-square-mile area. Urgency was crucial before debris could float away or be buried by mud. If found, the spacecraft structure and payload components would help ascertain the cause of the explosion. Recovering the hazardous components would also prevent fuel, oil, or other chemicals from polluting the ocean. Most morbid of all, finding the crew compartment would be the only guarantee that mangled limbs of astronauts didn’t wash up on Florida beaches and make matters worse.

  The Challenger explosion was a dramatic American moment, but like any disaster, its emotional punch was in its explosion, not its cleanup. I heard about the salvage operation for the first time from a handyman who was caulking the windows of my house one day. He mentioned he was a former deep-sea diver, and I told him I was working on a book about the deep sea. He suggested I talk to his friend who worked on the Challenger recovery in 1986.

  “Recovery?” I said. “What recovery?”

  “We basically had to go pick up all the parts,” his friend, Paul Kowalski, told me when I called him.

  Kowalski was a navy diver stationed in Washington, D.C., and was one of six thousand pairs of hands assigned to all be on deck, more than half of them divers. The navy provided an NR-1 nuclear submarine along with sonar rigs, remote-operated vehicles (ROVs), manned submersibles, and metal detectors. They called in a ragtag team of deep-sea professionals known to gather for high-profile sea hunts, including for wreckage of a Korean Air Lines plane shot down by the Soviets in 1983 and an Air India jet that exploded near Ireland in 1985.

  Once the sonar hit on something, Kowalski and other divers were sent down to check it out. Only one in eight hits were actually shuttle-related. The rest were oil drums, forgotten shipwrecks, and even an old DC-3 airplane that crashed in the 1930s. Sonar is notoriously bad for revealing shapes, and it fell to the “gut feel” of a few deep-sea veterans to tell if an object was a shuttle part or simply a fish hole or depression in the sand. Kowalski hauled up pieces of wreckage if he could or directed an ROV to the site. No one knew what happened to the debris after that, but rumors went around that NASA buried them in concrete bunkers to put them—and any radioactive components—out of sight and out of museums. The last thing NASA wanted in the Smithsonian was a memento of the agency’s worst day.

  In the end, the search was fruitful. The salvage operation recovered fifteen tons of debris, including half of the orbiter and more than half of the rockets. Six weeks passed before an unmanned vehicle discovered a window frame and a blue cushion, signs of the mangled crew cabin sitting in one hundred feet of water about seventeen miles off shore. The bodies were removed one by one—except one of them, payload specialist Greg Jarvis’s corpse, which floated out of the compartment during the rescue operation and was lost by the divers before they recovered it weeks later on the seabed. The search confirmed that the cause of the crash was weak O-rings unsuited to freezing temperatures that separated the fuel segments, a finding that helped NASA reengineer the space shuttle program. By the end, the entire operation had cost $13 million—a hefty but affordable sum to pick up the pieces of a national tragedy.

  As luck would have it, on April 12, 1986, one month into the search for the Challenger, sailors noticed a piece of debris floating near the wreck site that wasn’t related to the shuttle at all. The object turned out to be a duffel bag filled with a dozen bricks of high-quality cocaine that one could only assume fell off a smuggler’s boat. To the extent anything about the Challenger was even remotely funny, the navy crewmen joked that the salvage effort wound up paying for itself. By coincidence, the drugs were valued at exactly $13 million.

  * * *

  Looking at a shipwreck underwater is usually good enough. The vast majority of wrecks ever found have been gawked at by divers breathing from oxygen tanks. Lifting a boat, however, is accompanied by the requirement to do something with it, which frequently costs more than the salvage itself. In 2002, archaeologists found a fifteenth-century sailing ship near the town of Newport in Wales. Local people got interested in restoring the ship, which they nicknamed the Newport Ship, and tried to fundraise £3 million. But costs swelled when accounting for keeping an old ship in presentable shape in perpetuity.

  On a larger scale, the company that owned the Costa Concordia, the cruise ship that famously wrecked off Tuscany in 2013, debated for about five minutes whether to restore the ship to its pre-capsize grandeur. They decided that the more than €1 billion salvage operation was, in every sense, a sunk cost and sent the wreck to be scrapped.

  The complexity of salvage can also make it painfully boring. Like building an amusement park or passing a law, the process is far less interesting than the finished product. In 1980, the film Raise the Titanic, based on Clive Cussler’s classic novel, was a commercial flop because the title was the most breathtaking part. The plot followed a race between the U.S. and Russia to acquire a powerful made-up element called byzantium that held the potential for global dominance and yet only existed in a safe aboard the sunken Titanic. The fictional premise made for a decent book, but the film was such a box-office dud that it ended up losing more than $30 million. “Raise the Titanic?” one critic wrote. “It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic.” The plot was mired in technical details about metallurgy and fluid dynamics that made the film, according to another reviewer, “as creaking and slow-moving as a battleship attempting a U-turn.” Few in Hollywood have since tried to make a blockbuster film about the intricacies of deep-sea engineering.

  By January 1970, Doug Woolley began promising that his Titanic, the real one, would be out of the water within a year. That alone turned heads and yielded money. Woolley was often tight-lipped about how much he raised and from whom. But he announced on January 12 that a firm in West Germany had promised £10,000 and that, if all went as planned, the team would arrive at the wreck site by April. By March, little progress had been made on the preparations. But the team had expanded to now include a doctor, a nurse, two electronics experts, an Australian pensioner, and a twelve-year-old schoolboy, who Woolley suggested should be the team’s “mascot.” Using his connections in textile manufacturing, Woolley also convinced a Scottish clothier to donate a dozen coats for the crew heading to the Atlantic.

  “So far, everything is proceeding absolutely on schedule,” Woolley said in April. He claimed to have £10,000, a sum he believed sufficient for a preliminary survey to visit the patch of ocean where the ship was thought to have sunk. April came and went with no visit to the site. Woolley claimed he was still talking with experts and raising money, but he also began to distance himself from actually doing the complex work of deep-sea salvage. “We are confident,” he told the Reading Evening Post, “that practically every phase of the operation—the lifting and the special equipment—will be tackled by professional companies,” which he believed would donate their time and equipment in return for the “prestige and publicity” of participating. Two months later, Woolley pushed back the schedule another three months. A year later, he pushed it back again. All the while, his name continued to appear in the papers as the man on the verge of doing the impossible.

  How could journalists buy such a technical scheme dreamed up by such an unqualified enthusiast? Why didn’t anyone hold a magnifying glass to expose such an obvious house of cards? It’s hard to pathologize British reporters of the 1960s, but I’m sheepish to admit that in my experience, it’s easier than it seems to get caught up in a news story that’s too exciting not to be true. Many years ago, I proposed a story to my bosses at National Geographic about a group of young botanists in London growing lettuce in old World War II bomb shelters. The story had strong themes—past meets future, wartime tragedy fuels modern innovation, urban concrete becomes clean and green—plus the chance for great photos. Even though it was my job to be skeptical, it was also my job to tell colorful stories with vivid characters, and this story seemed to have it all. My editor enthusiastically agreed, and the next time I was in London, I scheduled an afternoon with a photographer for us to visit the tunnels. When we got there, it became clear that a dozen other journalists and TV camera guys had also been taken in by the story. We all marched down to the bunker and scribbled on our notepads as the two men made grand visionary statements to describe their brilliance. We went home and published the story, which became one of the most popular stories I ever wrote. Thousands of people read it online; many commented and sent me excited emails about it. Only years later, when I realized I hadn’t heard a single follow-up word about this supposedly transformative idea, did it occur to me that the whole thing was an empty news gimmick, a story without a center. We all were too wrapped up in an enchanting tale to consider what now seems obvious: that energy-guzzling farms in dank concrete tunnels could hardly feed a single person, let alone the world. Reality came a distant second to the chance to tell a gripping tale, and we bought it wholesale.

  You can fool reporters only so many times on the same story, though. And in late 1971, Woolley’s facade started to show cracks. The money from the West Germans never came. The Hungarian craft was never quite ready, or maybe it didn’t exist at all; Woolley had never seen it. He wrote to several salvage firms that specialized in deep-sea maneuvers, and all either laughed at the question or quoted him an absurdly high price to lead an operation they knew had little chance of success.

  But these were mere technical matters in a sea of existential concerns. By now the project had firmly entwined itself with Woolley’s personal identity. The Liverpool Echo reported in late 1971 that Woolley “staked his existence on lugging the great ship back to life.” Rescuing the Titanic was his “lifelong ambition,” another profiler wrote. Woolley, a bachelor at thirty-eight, told friends that “The Big T is my first and last love.”

  Under such immense expectations, a weaker man might let the whole house of cards fall and move on. But Woolley had invested too much. The only way he’d let go of the Titanic was if the frigid ocean itself pried it out of his cold hands. If he had to, he was prepared to go down with the ship.

  * * *

  Would it have made a difference if Woolley and the rest of the world knew where the Titanic actually was? Would it have been easier if the search and recovery mission was minimized to recovery only? Needles in haystacks don’t often identify themselves, but yes, a precise location would likely have downgraded the difficulty of lifting the Titanic from preposterous to merely absurd.

  Wrecks far closer to shore in much shallower water remained mysteriously hidden from even advanced wreck hunters for decades longer than the Titanic. The USS Monitor, the famous ironclad Civil War battleship that sank two hundred fifty feet deep off North Carolina in 1862, evaded investigators from the U.S. government and the National Science Foundation for more than a century, until 1973, the same year Woolley was running out of steam, when the old steamship appeared off the coast of North Carolina on recordings from a sonar rig towed behind a research boat. It took three different cameras to confirm it was the Monitor. Pulling it out of the water didn’t begin until the Clinton administration.

  For almost all of history, humans who roamed the planet on boats believed that boats sunk were almost always boats gone. But with the turn of the twentieth century came a soaring interest in the natural world. One can picture a sprightly Teddy Roosevelt leading this new growth of oceanic awareness, but in fact it was Prince Albert of Monaco, the ocean buff formerly obsessed with the Gulf Stream. In 1910, Albert commissioned four research yachts to tow sonic and ultrasonic devices around the Mediterranean. The data produced the first underwater maps a year after the Titanic sank. It would be decades before sonar could capture the rocky and muddy nuances of the seabed’s endless texture—and even longer (we’re still waiting) before this technology could be deployed worldwide to map the entire seafloor.

  A century later, there’s a common line repeated by marine scientists: that we know more about the surface of Mars than we do about the ocean floor. By and large, it’s true, because Mars is easier to map. Land-based maps are the result of orbiting satellites emitting micro radio waves. But radio waves get stuck in water and don’t bounce back. So the easiest way to map the bottom of the ocean is in fact to map the surface of the ocean, which is never truly flat. Underwater gravity pulls and pushes water in strange ways. An undersea mountain five hundred feet tall will raise the sea surface above it about one foot. The bumps or depressions are even more dramatic around the ocean’s major geologic features, like the Mariana Trench or the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. In 2014, a group of scientists discovered that undersea topography and swirling currents have the effect of sloping the oceans. They found that the sea level off the coast of Europe is three inches lower than off the East Coast of the United States.

  More detailed elevations are impossible to see from space; in fact, they’re visible only using expensive and clunky sonar rigs towed behind ships that send sound waves down and convert the time of their bounce back to an estimated distance. This explains why every high school science classroom has a map showing the broad contours of the seafloor, but not even the best scientists on earth using the most modern tools can find history’s most famous undiscovered shipwrecks, like Columbus’s Santa Maria or the SS Waratah, a 1909 passenger ship nicknamed Australia’s Titanic. More modern searches are just as vexing. In 2014, after Malaysian Airlines flight 370 disappeared over a region of the Indian Ocean known for extreme depths and punishing surface conditions, three countries spent three years combing nearly fifty thousand square miles of the seafloor using the most advanced sonar technology in existence for any sign of the airliner or the 239 people on board. They abandoned the search without finding a single trace.