Explorers have discovered one of history’s most famous shipwrecks, Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance, deep in the icy waters in Antarctica, more than a century after it sank, they said Wednesday.
Endurance was discovered at a depth of 3,008 meters (9,869 feet) in the Weddell Sea, some six kilometers (four miles) from where it had been slowly crushed by pack ice in 1915.
Shackleton’s courageous escape with his 27 comrades on foot and in boats cemented his place in expeditionary folklore.
“We are overwhelmed by our good fortune in having located and received images of Endurance,” said Mansun Bound, the expedition’s head of exploration.
“By far the most stunning piece of timber debris I’ve ever seen.” It is in fantastic shape and stands erect, proud of the seabed. “You can even see ‘Endurance’ arced over the stern,” he said in a statement.
The mission was organized by the Falkland Maritime Heritage Trust and set out from Cape Town on February 5 with a South African icebreaker in the hopes of discovering the Endurance before the end of the Southern Hemisphere summer.
Endurance’s crew was meant to make the first land crossing of Antarctica between 1914 and 1917 as part of Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition.
However, their three-masted sailship was lost in the furious Weddell Sea.
The wood vessel became entangled in pack ice approximately east of the Larsen ice shelf on the Antarctic peninsula in January 1915. It was slowly smashed before sinking a decade later.
The world’s most dangerous sea
The crew established a camp on the sea ice and travelled north until the ice broke up, at which time they leaped into lifeboats.
They initially sailed to Elephant Island, a desolate wasteland devoid of trees, where the majority of the soldiers were unloaded and a camp was erected.
Shackleton next led five people on a 1,300-kilometer (800-mile) journey to South Georgia, a British colony with a whaling station, using only a sextant for navigation.
The 17-day voyage in the 6.9-meter (22.4-foot) open boat, which survived enormous storms and severe weather, is widely recognized as one of the most extraordinary accomplishments in nautical history.
The expedition’s 28 members all survived.
Modern researchers used underwater drones to find and video shipwrecks in the hostile Weddell Sea. Its whirling circulation keeps a thick covering of sea ice in place, which may confound even the most modern icebreakers.
Shackleton described the sinking location as “the worst section of the worst sea on the earth.”
The region remains one of the most difficult parts of the ocean to navigate.
Nico Vincent, the mission’s underwater project manager, stated, “This has been the most complex subsea project ever performed.”
The underwater drones caught remarkable detail on the 44-meter-long (144-foot-long) ship.
The helm has miraculously survived more than a century below, with gear heaped against the taffrail as if Shackleton’s crew had just left it.
The ship’s timbers have been ruined by the ice that has sunk in, yet it is still intact. A mast had split in half across the deck, and portholes hinted at what mysteries lay underneath.
Sea anemones, sponges, and other small aquatic life forms lived on the trash, but they did not appear to harm it.
Like the Titanic
The underwater drones caught remarkable detail on the 44-meter-long (144-foot-long) ship.
The helm has miraculously survived more than a century below, with gear heaped against the taffrail as if Shackleton’s crew had just left it.
The ship’s timbers have been ruined by the ice that has sunk in, yet it is still intact. A mast had split in half across the deck, and portholes hinted at what mysteries lay underneath.
Sea anemones, sponges, and other small aquatic life forms lived on the trash, but they did not appear to harm it.
“Seeing the images of that ship on the bottom is quite astonishing,” said Adrian Glover, a deep-sea researcher at the Natural History Museum in the United Kingdom.
“It’s not a forgiving environment, as Shackleton and others learned,” he told AFP. “There, the sea ice may grow up quickly and shatter a ship, or at the very least slow it down.”
The icebreaker is owned by South Africa’s environment ministry, which said that a previous trip in 2019 had failed to locate the Endurance.
Under international law, the wreck has been recognized as a historic site. Explorers could film and scan the spacecraft but not touch it, meaning that no relics could be transported back to the surface.
The team deployed Sabertooth underwater search drones, which were created by Saab and dived beneath the ice to the Weddell Sea’s deepest depths.
Scientists studied climate change during the flight, monitoring ice drifts and weather trends.
Stefanie Arndt, a sea ice researcher from Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institut, said on Twitter that she will be returning with 630 samples of ice and snow. “That’s a large number,” she observed.
The team must now finish the 11-day journey back to the port in Cape Town.
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