Over a century after slipping beneath the unforgiving Southern Ocean, a search party has located the wreck of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance.
As The New York Times reports:
A team of adventurers, marine archaeologists and technicians located the wreck at the bottom of the Weddell Sea, east of the Antarctic Peninsula, using undersea drones. Battling sea ice and freezing temperatures, the team had been searching for more than two weeks in a 150-square-mile area around where the ship went down in 1915.
Endurance, a 144-foot, three-masted wooden ship, holds a revered place in polar history because it spawned one of the greatest survival stories in the annals of exploration. Its location, nearly 10,000 feet down in waters that are among the iciest on Earth, placed it among the most celebrated shipwrecks that had not been found.
WATCH:
After unusually heavy pack ice trapped Endurance off of the coast of Antarctica in January 1915, Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition took on an entirely new mission: getting his 27 men home alive.
Instead of being the first men to cross the Antarctic continent, Shackleton and his crew survived impossible odds as pack ice slowly crushed Endurance over the following 11 months. With little more than reinforced life boats and simple navigation tools, the crew sailed to Elephant Island. The island offered the crew a degree of shelter, but its inhospitable nature and distance from shipping lanes made their long-term prospects of survival grim. Aware of their odds, Shackleton sailed 800 miles with five of his ablest men to South Georgia island after a nine day rest. The crew, aboard a 22.5 foot boat, overcame severe winter storms and rogue waves, only to land on the wrong side of South Georgia. From there, Shackleton and the two men he thought most likely to survive had to navigate the island’s uncharted interior to reach the whaling station on the other side.
Unbelievably, all three survived. Their 36-hour journey across South Georgia involved sliding down 10,000 foot mountains, not knowing if the would suddenly fall to their deaths off of an icy precipice. Eventually, Shackleton was able to make his way back to Elephant Island, where he rescued the remainder of his crew.
Though their return to civilization took more than two years, every man in Shackleton’s expedition survived.
Their odyssey is regarded as one of the greatest survival stories ever told.
The Times continues:
The ship was found about four miles south of the last location recorded by Shackleton’s captain and navigator, Frank Worsley. The search had been conducted over a wide area to account for errors in Worsley’s navigation equipment.
…
The hunt for the wreck, which cost more than $10 million, provided by a donor who wished to remain anonymous, was conducted from a South African icebreaker that left Cape Town in early February. Aside from a few technical glitches involving the two submersibles, and part of a day spent icebound when operations were suspended, the search proceeded relatively smoothly.
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