Shipwreck of Ernest Shackleton’s ‘Endurance’ found a century after sinking

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Shipwreck of Ernest Shackleton’s 'Endurance' found a century after sinking

Mar 9, 2022: The wreck of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance has been found 107 years after it became trapped in sea ice and sank off the coast of Antarctica.

The wooden ship had not been seen since it went down in the Weddell Sea in 1915, and in February the Endurance22 Expedition set off from Cape Town, South Africa, a month after the 100th anniversary of Sir Ernest’s death on a mission to locate it.

Organized by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, the expedition left Cape Town on February 5 with a South African icebreaker, in the hope that endurance would be found before the end of the Southern Hemisphere summer.

Between 1914 and 1917, as part of Sheckleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic expedition, Endurance aimed to make Antarctica’s first land crossing, but it fell victim to the turbulent Wedell Sea.

The Endurance was discovered at a depth of 3,008 metres in the Weddell Sea, 6km from where it was slowly crushed by pack ice in 1915. The expedition’s director of exploration said footage of Endurance showed it to be intact and “by far the finest wooden shipwreck” he has seen.

“We are overwhelmed by our good fortune in having located and captured images of Endurance,” said Mensun Bound, the expedition’s director of exploration, on Wednesday.

“This is by far the finest wooden shipwreck I have ever seen. It is upright, well proud of the seabed, intact, and in a brilliant state of preservation. You can even see ‘Endurance’ arced across the stern,” he said in a statement.

Despite being trapped on ice, Endurance’s 28-member crew brought him back home and his history is considered one of the greatest stories of human survival. They trekked across sea ice, away from seals and penguins, before traveling in three lifeboats and reaching the uninhabited Elephant Island.

From there, Sheckleton and a handful of crew traveled 1,300 kilometers on the lifeboat James Caird to South Georgia, where they sought help from a wheeling station. In his fourth rescue attempt, Sheckleton managed to return from Elephant Island in August 1916, two years after his expedition left London, to retrieve the rest of the crew.

Shackleton himself described the site of the sink as “the worst portion of the worst sea in the world”.

The region remains one of the most difficult parts of the ocean to navigate.

The discovery team used underwater drones to find and film the shipwreck in the merciless Weddell Sea, which has a swirling current that sustains a mass of thick sea ice that can challenge even modern ice breakers.

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