Jul 12
Jul 12, 2026 ATACAMAOn August 5th, 2010, the San José copper and gold mine in Chile's Atacama Desert collapsed and sealed 33 men roughly 700 meters underground. For 17 days, no one on the surface knew whether they were alive, until a drill bit came back up carrying a note written in red ink: "Estamos bien en el refugio los 33." This is the full story of how those men survived on a spoonful of tuna every few days, ran their underground refuge as a democracy, and were finally lifted back to daylight after 69 days by a rescue involving NASA, the Chilean Navy, and a capsule barely 21 inches wide, watched live by around a billion people.