Rediscovery of an Iconic Ship that was Lost for More than a Century
The wrack of the Endurance, the ship with which the British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton tried to reach the South Pole was discovered after having been lost for 107 years. The Endurance22 expedition team found it at a depth of more than three kilometers in the Weddell Sea of the coast of Antarctica.
The Endurance
The Endurance was a wooden sailing ship built in 1912 in Norway. Originally it was called Polaris and measured 44 meters in length and 7.6 meters in width. Back in 1912, it was considered one of the strongest wooden ships ever made.
Its original purpose was a luxury yacht but it turned out unsuitable for that purpose. The explorer Ernest Shackleton acquired it in 1914 for his polar expeditions. He was the one that renamed it Endurance.
On August 6, 1914, Shackleton left Great Britain and arrived in the polar area in December 1914. He wanted to be the first to cross Antarctica by land. Initially, the sturdy ship was able to work its way through the polar ice and the expedition went ahead. But that was before the arrival of winter in the southern hemisphere.
On October 18, 1915, the ship got stuck in the ice mass and was not able to get out. Cold weather and sea and ice waves caused the ice to crush the Endurance. It lasted several days more but on November 21, 1915, it sank to its icy resting place. The entire crew, including Mrs. Chippy, the ship’s cat, was able to leave the ship before it went down. The Endurance’s captain Frank Worsley carefully recorded the coordinates of the location where the ship went down: 68°39’ 30”S, 52°26’30”W.
The Expedition
For more than a century the whereabouts of the sunken ship remained a mystery. Efforts to locate it were made on different occasions, all of them without success. The Endurance22 team in association with the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust set out again in February 2022.
The coordinates that Captain Frank Worsley left were a great help to the crew of the Endurance22 team. However, previous missions had not been able to locate the wreck in that location. This search team would need to expand the search area.
The Weddell Sea is notorious for its thick ice. The sea is defined as a sort of large bay. Any ice that forms, is trapped in the area and this is what caused problems for the Shackleton expedition. In recent years the conditions have been much milder and this is what has helped the Endurance22 team to search the sea bed.
The question is of course, how do you locate a relatively small ship in a vast icy sea? The Endurance22 answer to that problem was AUVs, or Autonomous Underwater Vehicles. The AUVs that the team used have the catchy name Sabertooths.
These Sabertooths are like drones but for underwater applications. They have high-definition cameras and side-scan imaging capabilities. The AUVs can search large areas of the seafloor down to depths of four kilometers.
The costs of the expedition are around $10 million. Not cheap but logical considering the needed equipment and the conditions under which the search was done.
That is a lot of work to find a sunken ship. But this expedition also:
- Gained more understanding of what happened with the ship.
- Brought the story of Shackleton and his crew to a young and international audience through a digital live channel.
- Did research into
- Sea ice condition
- Antarctic meteorology and oceanography
- Vessel performance under Antarctic conditions
A Successful Approach
Using this approach, the Endurance22 team succeeded in locating the shipwreck and they announced their exciting find on March 9, 2022. It was found nearly 6.5 kilometers south of the location recorded by Worsley. No wonder previous expeditions were not able to locate it.
The researchers made extensive photographs, and film footage of the wreck. They also used ultra-high-definition 3D scanning techniques to document the ship and the surrounding debris field.
The identity of the wreck was established beyond a doubt by footage of the ship’s stern where the name in copper letters appeared.
The masts are down and the rigging is in a mess. The hull of the ship is still mainly intact. The cameras spotted the anchors and some even mentioned the presence of some of the ship’s crew’s boots and earthenware.
The ship is in excellent conditions, undoubtedly thanks to the sub-zero temperatures of the seawater. Most of the oceans contain wood-eating microbes and micro-organisms but they are apparently not present in the Antarctic Weddell Sea. Still, there are many sea creatures living in the ship’s hull. Researchers were able to see sponges, anemones, sea squirts, brittle stars, and other life. These creatures have the perfect place to filter out some of the sea’s nutrients.
In 1961 several countries ratified the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS). This agreement legalized the status of the uninhabited continent. It specified, among other things, that it would only be used for scientific research and not for any military purposes. This treaty is important for the Endurance too because it protects the wreck as a historic site and monument. The discoverers had to take this into account as well; the AUVs did not touch it; it was only investigated with images and scans.