Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
SCIENTISTS’ ANTARCTIC SEARCH FOR SHACKLETON’S SHIPWRECK
Team will search ocean floor for Irish explorer’s Endurance vessel
SCIENTISTS have arrived in the Antarctic to search for the wreck of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s lost ship Endurance.
The team have broken through 10ft of pack-ice to reach the vessel’s last-known position in the Weddell Sea.
They will deploy robotic submersibles to search the ocean floor.
Shackleton, from Kilkea, Co Kildare, and his 28 crew had to abandon Endurance in 1915 when it was crushed by sea-ice and sank in 9,000ft of water.
Their escape across the frozen floes on foot and by three lifeboats would take three months.
The wooden polar yacht is perhaps the most sought-after of all undiscovered wrecks. But the British-led expedition has given itself just five days to find the vessel.
Operating from the South African ice-breaker, the SA Agulhas II, the team’s plan is to put down an autonomous underwater vehicle to map the seafloor over a 45-hour period.
There will be no attempt to retrieve artefacts should the Endurance be found.
The intention is only to make a 3D model of the wreck site and take photos.
Expedition chief Prof Julian Dowdeswell said: “The autonomous vehicle has a number of different sensors, ranging in resolution from about 10m down to about half a metre.
“And it also has cameras. It’s not going to be as crisp as the image you or I might take – but almost as good as that.
“The robot has to be recovered by the parent vessel [before the data can be interrogated]. And the difficulty with this is that in severe sea-ice conditions it’s not that easy to recover the autonomous underwater vehicle.
“That is an act of seamanship in itself – before the data can be looked at.”
Shackleton’s skipper Frank Worsely was a very skilled navigator and used a sextant and chronometer to calculate the precise co-ordinates of where the Endurance sunk.
The ship is almost certainly within a few nautical miles of this location and there is every chance it is in reasonable condition.