Brits lead quest for Shackleton’s vessel swallowed by ice
ANTARCTICA: When on November 21, 1915 the polar exploration ship Endurance finally yielded to the Antarctic pack ice, Ernest Shackleton and his crew began one of the most gruelling survival attempts in history.
Their five-month ordeal on the ice floes followed by a 720-nautical mile (1300km) dash to South Georgia has since become the stuff of legend. But of the ship itself, no trace has been detected since the day it went down.
Yesterday, a British-led team announced it is setting out to find the wreck of Endurance, thought to be at rest nearly three kilometres beneath the Larsen C Ice Shelf in the Weddell Sea.
Operating from the research ship SA Agulhas II, the expedition will use the most advanced unmanned submarines in the world to scour the seabed.
But the team will also arrive armed with an equally important tool – information from the diary of Captain Frank Worsley, the renowned navigator who was busy recording precise sextant readings even as the ship went down.
At least three previous plans to find Endurance have failed.
If the Weddell Sea Expedition 2019 succeeds, the ship will be listed as a historic monument, protected under international law.
In 2013, scientists at Britain’s Natural History Museum said they believed the ship may have been preserved by wood-boring worms carried by the Antarctic circumpolar current.
‘‘If the expedition finds the wreck, we will survey, photograph and film it and document its condition,’’ said Professor Julian Dowdeswell, director of the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, who is leading the team.
‘‘If there are deep-water marine species colonising the wreck, the marine biologists may try to obtain scientific samples using the Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV), if that can be deployed above the site from the ship.
‘‘However, we will not remove any items from the wreck.’’
Built in Norway in 1912, Endurance was arguably the strongest wooden ship constructed, with a 2.2-metre keel made from four pieces of solid oak. But unlike ‘‘bowl-bottomed’’ ships of the period, it was not designed to rise out of the sea ice when it closed in. This meant that when the ship became trapped in the polar pack ice, the pressure was taken by the hull, which gave up after 10 months.
Shackleton and his 27 crew members subsequently spent weeks surviving on the ice, hoping it would drift them towards safety. Eventually, they used three lifeboats to reach Elephant Island. Shackleton and five others then set sail for South Georgia in search of help, arriving two weeks later. It was not until August 1916 that the last of his crew was rescued.
Funded by the Flotilla Foundation, the new expedition will send drones ahead of the SA Agulhas II to seek out the best route through the ice.
The effort to locate Endurance will be undertaken alongside a detailed scientific study of the Larsen C Ice Shelf, which is acutely susceptible to atmospheric warming from above and ocean warming from below.
‘‘Our expedition will be the first to use autonomous underwater vehicles,’’ said Dowdeswell. ‘‘Because they can free swim, it is not necessary for the vessel to be directly above the wreck location. So long as we can get close enough to the location with the ship, we can deploy them under the ice and conduct the search.’’
Scientists have found that snowfall is increasing in Antarctica, which could help to counteract rising sea levels.
The first comprehensive study of snowfall in Antarctica has proven that there has been up to a 10 per cent increase in precipitation over the last 200 years, leading to more snowfall.