Underwater search for Shackleton’s sunken Endurance defeated by Antarctic weather

A BRITISH-LED expedition to find the Endurance, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship, has been defeated by horrendous weather and pack ice – the very conditions that trapped the explorer’s vessel in Antarctica more than a century ago.

The expedition was called off yesterday after “extreme weather conditions” led to the loss of an autonomous robotic submarine that, it was hoped, would have located the wreck.

The Endurance became trapped in pack ice and sank in the Weddell Sea in 1915. The expedition reached the wreck site earlier this week, relying on detailed records left by Frank Worsley, the captain of the Endurance, and deployed the submersible.

The AUV7 robot was on the final leg of a 30-hour mission when it lost contact with SA Agulhas II, the expedition ship. Running the risk of becoming trapped in the ice itself, as the Endurance was, the polar research vessel had to withdraw. Frustratingly for the team, it is not known whether the submersible captured images of the Endurance wreck.

“As a team, we are clearly disappointed not to have been successful,” said Mensun Bound, director of exploration.

“Like Shackleton before us, who described the graveyard of Endurance as ‘the worst portion of the worst sea in the world’, our well-laid plans were overcome by the rapidly moving ice, and what Shackleton called ‘the evil conditions of the Weddell Sea’.”

Oliver Plunkett, the head of Ocean Infinity, the US company that provided the AUV7, said: “Everyone is deeply disappointed that at the 11th hour, we were not able to produce the images of what is the most challenging shipwreck in the world to locate.”

While it failed to find the Endurance, the expedition did collect valuable information on the Larsen C Ice Shelf, which two years ago calved a huge iceberg known as A68, which is four times the size of Greater London.