ByKaren Graham
Published February 20, 2022
Sub Sea team retrieves the AUV after a test dive on February 15, 2022.
After an 11-day voyage aboard a South African icebreaker, the expedition, known as Endurance22, reached the Weddell Sea in Antarctica and began searching for one of the most celebrated wrecks yet to be found – Ernest Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance.
As CBC News Canada so aptly describes Shackleton’s voyage; after the ship became trapped in the Weddell Sea’s pack ice and sank, the crew’s fight to survive has become one of the epic adventure stories of its age.
Thanks to the accuracy of Endurance’s captain and navigator, Frank Worsley, the ship’s location when it sank is known, but it lies under the floating ice of the Weddell Sea, some 3,000 meters (10,000 feet) below the surface.
This week, underwater drones equipped with cameras, sonar, and lasers have been scanning 100 square miles of seafloor looking for the remains of the 144-foot wooden ship.
Mensun Bound, a marine archaeologist and the expedition’s director of exploration, said in an email that after a few technical glitches, the submersibles were functioning well, carrying out several dives each day, reports the New York Times.
So far, the images show that the seafloor is flat and consists of fine sediment and small rocks. “It should be possible to identify quickly any wreckage,” he said.
The wreckage, if found, will probably not be intact. Photographs of the Endurance taken in 1915 show how badly the crushing forces of the Antarctic ice damaged the ship before it sank.
Studying the Weddell Sea’s pack ice
Onboard the Agulhas II are sea ice researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), the German Aerospace Lab (DLR) and Drift+Noise Polar Services (an AWI spin-off company).
Besides providing ice navigation support, they will be undertaking a program of sea ice monitoring and measurements, looking for signs that it is changing as the world warms as a result of human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases.
Two helicopters aboard the ship have been used to ferry these scientists to ice floes, where ice cores are drilled for later laboratory analysis. Sea-ice cores (1 to 5 meters long and 10cm wide) will be taken from selected ice floes using electric-powered ice-coring devices as well as snow samples.
Additionally, four ‘snow buoys’ will be deployed to selected ice floes. The snow buoys are designed to measure the small-scale variability of snow thickness. For this purpose, each buoy is equipped with ultrasonic sensors that measure the distance to the surface.
By calibrating a buoy using the snow depth measured during deployment on the ice, it is possible to continuously calculate the change in snow depth. In addition, the air and surface temperature, as well as the air pressure is recorded.
Henry Fountain
February 4, 2022·
Ernest Shackleton's ship, Endurance, trapped in ice in the Weddell Sea in 1915.
A century after Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance sank in the waters of Antarctica, resulting in one of the greatest survival stories in the history of exploration, a team of modern adventurers, technicians and scientists is setting sail to find the wreck.
With a crew of 46 and a 64-member expedition team aboard, a South African icebreaker is set to leave Cape Town on Saturday, bound for the Weddell Sea. Once there, the team hopes to find the wreck and explore it with two underwater drones.
Getting there won’t be easy. Crushed by pack ice in 1915, the 144-foot-long Endurance is sitting in 10,000 feet of water. And this isn’t just any water: In the Weddell, a swirling current sustains a mass of thick, nasty sea ice that can be a match even for modern icebreakers.
Shackleton himself, whose plans to be the first to cross Antarctica were derailed by the loss of his ship, described the site of the sinking as “the worst portion of the worst sea in the world.”
“It’s the most unreachable wreck ever,” said Mensun Bound, a marine archaeologist and director of exploration of the expedition, Endurance22. “Which makes this the greatest wreck hunt of all time.”
Endurance is also one of the most famous shipwrecks, perhaps on par with the Titanic. It’s a relic of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration, when adventurers undertook elaborate, risky and wildly popular expeditions to the continent and the pole. Some, like Roald Amundsen, succeeded. Others, like Robert Falcon Scott, died in the process.
Shackleton failed to achieve his goal, but when he returned to Britain having saved all his crew after an epic open-boat journey across treacherous seas, he was hailed as a hero. He’s still lionized today, in books, films and even business school courses, where the expedition is considered a case study in effective leadership.
“I’m as much under the spell of Shackleton and Endurance as anybody,” said Caroline Alexander, an author and co-curator of a 1999 exhibition about the Endurance expedition at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Of the wreck, she said, “its significance almost is emotional rather than, say, strictly historical.”
The expedition to find it, financed at a cost of more than $10 million by an anonymous donor, will have less than two weeks to locate the wreck once the icebreaker reaches the Weddell Sea. If Endurance is found, the drones will take photographs and videos and make precise laser scans of the wreckage. But the site won’t be disturbed, as it has been declared a historic monument under the terms of the Antarctic Treaty, an international agreement signed in 1959 intended to preserve the continent for peaceful purposes.
The wreck is expected to be in relatively good shape because of the cold water and the absence of wood-eating organisms in Antarctic seas.
Thanks to the work of Endurance’s captain and navigator, Frank Worsley, who with basic navigational tools was able to determine the ship’s location around the time it sank, the expedition is confident the wreck is in a 7-mile by 14-mile zone in the western Weddell.
“We know pretty much where we need to go,” said John Shears, leader of Endurance22, who is making his 25th expedition to Antarctica. And so far this season (it is the Antarctic summer) satellite imagery shows the pack ice has not been too bad. “We’re very optimistic that we’ll get over the wreck site with the ship,” Shears said.
But a shift in winds or a sudden drop in temperature can change things in a hurry, as Shackleton learned the hard way. Should the ice make reaching the wreck site impossible, the expedition has an audacious Plan B. It involves using two helicopters to dispatch equipment and technicians to a drifting ice floe, where they will drill a 3-foot-wide hole and launch the submersibles from there.
Lasse Rabenstein, the expedition’s chief scientist, and other sea-ice experts on board would have to choose a floe that can safely support the crew and equipment. But there is another wrinkle, Rabenstein said. Because it would take a few days to set up a camp on the floe, the task for him and others would be to choose one “so that two days later we are over the wreck site,” Rabenstein said. “And that’s a most delicate question.”
A previous expedition three years ago ended in failure when an older-technology submersible was lost before technicians could determine whether it had located the wreck. The newer ones will be connected to the surface by a fiber-optic cable that can deliver images and data in real time.
Built in Norway of massive timbers, powered by both steam and sail, Endurance was designed to withstand the extreme pressures of maneuvering through pack ice.
Shackleton set sail in late 1914 with a crew of 27 men, bound for Vahsel Bay on the eastern side of the Weddell Sea. The plan was for Shackleton and a small party to journey across the vast Antarctic ice sheet to the South Pole, as Amundsen had been the first to do in 1911, but then keep going, to the Ross Sea on the other side of the continent.
They never made it to the starting point. In early 1915, about 100 miles from the bay, the Endurance became stuck in the Weddell’s drifting pack ice. Shackleton and his crew watched for months as the ship suffered from the pressure of the ice building up around it. The crew eventually decamped to the ice and emptied Endurance of food and stores and almost everything else, including three open lifeboats, before it sank in November.
The rest of the story is the stuff of legend. The following April, as the ice broke up, all 28 men sailed in the lifeboats to Elephant Island, little more than a rocky outcropping north of the Antarctic Peninsula. From there Shackleton, Worsley and four others, enduring freezing weather and rough seas, sailed one of the 22-foot boats 800 miles to the nearest inhabited island, South Georgia.
It was an extraordinary feat of sailing, one that was immediately followed by an extraordinary feat of mountaineering, in which Shackleton and two others made the first crossing of the island’s peaks and glaciers to reach a whaling station on the opposite side. From there he organized rescues of the other men, who were picked up, alive, within months.
“There are a lot of people for whom the story is familiar,” said Donald Lamont, chairman of the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, which organized the expedition. “But also a lot of people globally who don’t know the story at all.” So the expedition team includes digital media specialists who will chronicle the search via online streaming, and if the wreck is found, the images and data gathered from the site could become the basis of museum exhibitions.
“It’s a springboard to the human stories of the people who went down there,” Lamont said. (A former governor of the Falkland Islands, he won’t be on the ship. “I very happily sit in the warmth and comfort of the United Kingdom and say, ‘Farewell and good luck.' ”)
Even if the wreck isn’t found, the expedition should help scientists better understand the ice of the Weddell Sea, and how it is changing as the planet warms because of emissions of greenhouse gases.
Among the scientists on board will be Stefanie Arndt, a sea-ice researcher from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. Arndt took part in the Mosaic scientific expedition of 2019-20, in which an icebreaker drifted with the ice across the Arctic Ocean. But her specialty is actually Antarctic ice, so she jumped at the chance to join this one.
Arndt will be taking samples and studying the properties of the sea ice, which are affected in part by the snow that falls on it. Unlike Arctic sea ice, which has declined in seasonal extent over decades as the Earth has warmed, sea ice extent around Antarctica has remained relatively constant. Arndt will be looking for signs that long-term changes are beginning.
But she is also looking forward to the search for the Endurance. “This is a really huge thing,” she said. “And for me, it’s really special. The first book I read about Antarctica was one about Shackleton’s expedition. This was for me the kickoff into polar science.”
© 2022 The New York Times Company
18 Feb, 2022
By Thomas Bywater
Thomas Bywater is a writer and digital producer for Herald Travel
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Shackleton's lost ship may be about to be found. What of their forgotten New Zealand sister ship left, stranded on the ice flow?
It is hard to write what I feel. To a sailor his ship is more than a floating home, and in the Endurance I had centred ambitions, hopes, and desires. Now, straining and groaning, her timbers cracking and her wounds gaping, she is slowly giving up her sentient life at the very outset of her career. - Ernest Shackleton - Wednesday, October 27, 1915
An expedition has arrived in Antarctica, in search of the lost relic of the heroic age: Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance.
One hundred and seven years ago, the Irish explorer Ernest Henry Shackleton led one of the most daring rescues from the continent. Trapped by sea ice in the Weddell Sea the wooden ship was crushed, leaving Shackleton and his men to hike their life rafts to safety.
All 28 men survived but the Endurance was left behind on the sea bed.
Photographer Frank Hurley's images of the wreckage and escape helped illustrate the peril but also the larger-than-life heroic characters. Restored motion pictures were recently screened at the BFI Southbank, London.
The story of Shackleton and New Zealander Frank Worsley's incredible 1300km sail to South Georgia has been retold many times.
Endurance 22 aims to write a closing chapter for the doomed expedition, using the latest scientific technology to discover the famous Antarctic wreck.
Expedition leader John Shears said finding the ship would be the most significant discovery since the Titanic and "a landmark moment for what we hope will be a truly historic expedition."
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But while Shackleton and his crew were making their way to safety there was another ship on the other side of the continent, the Aurora, facing equally dire circumstances.
"We must not forget that the expedition had two parts," said David Lamont, Chairman of The Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust. While the Endurance's crew are celebrated, the sister ship is often forgotten.
The Endurance was just one half of the 1914 expedition to cross the continent of Antarctica.
While they set up in the Weddell Sea, a second team had sailed from Hobart to the Ross Sea as a welcoming party. Their job was to set up supply depots for the crossing party. Working inland as far as the Beardsley glacier, they sledged to within 100 nautical miles of the South Pole.
Without these Shackleton's party would have been walking to their deaths.
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However, when disaster struck the Endurance and the party turned back, they failed to inform Aurora about the delay.
The Ross Sea team were trapped on the ice for nine months without help. When the ship was carried away by pack ice, the supply party were stranded. Waiting for a crossing that never came by the time some of the Aurora's remaining sailors were eventually rescued in January 1917.
Having left home in 1914, they were oblivious to the fact that the First World War had happened.
The Lost Men
After being damaged in sea ice and drifting from the Ross Sea, Aurora had to return to New Zealand for repairs she could not afford. Those left behind on the ice had no means of rescue.
Of the ten men stranded on the ice three would never return.
Victor Hayward wrote in his diary that
"We are 10 men who have to relieve Shackleton at the Beardmore Glacier 400 miles distant without any equipment to speak of." to "do our damnedest,"
The captain Aeneas Mackintosh and Hayward were lost in a blizzard.
Arnold Spencer-Smith, the ship's chaplain and closest thing to amateur photographer died of scurvy.
It was only In 2013, the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust discovered expedition photographs in the Cape Evans hut where they sheltered.
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They were able to develop twenty-two images from the 1914-17 expedition. A snapshot of the party largely unseen and forgotten for 99 years.
Author Kelly Tyler-Lewis was inspired to write 'The Lost Men' about the Ross Sea Party, partially because of how ordinary and inexperienced the men were.
"Only two had Antarctic experience—they included a minister, a schoolteacher, and a clerk," she said.
They were the B-Team in every respect. However their setting of resupply depots saw them spend longer on the ice than any other explorers of their age, including Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen.
"Unsupported, they travelled 1,356 nautical miles. And they did it, not for glory, but because they believed lives depended on them."
Shackleton, or 'the Boss' as he came to be known, was a master not only of exploring but also in storytelling. His Antarctic Crossing was a failure, but following his escape from the Weddell Sea he and his men were celebrated as heroes.
Frank Hurley's photos were a big part of telling that story. Images that largely omitted the fact the Aurora ever existed.
Donald Lamont feels that the Ross Sea team were largely forgotten because - until recently - we had so little imagery of them.
"I find it a pity that in the opening frames of Hurley's film there is the image of the captain of Aurora and that's the last you hear of it," says Lamont. "There's no other reference to the Ross Sea Party."
On return to New Zealand, Shackleton donated proceeds of a lecturing tour to the families of the missing men.
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The Endurance
At the beginning of the month the ice-strengthened Agulhas II departed Cape Town for the Weddell Sea. The search platform for the Endurance 22 expedition, this isn't it's first time looking for Shackleton's wreck.
It almost suffered the same fate, stuck in polar sea ice.
An earlier mission was abandoned in 2019 after losing a remote, unmanned submarine. The search was cut short as the ice pack closed in around them, threatening to trap the Agulhas.
The technology might be better but the dangers remain the same.
As Shackleton put it, Endurance was "crushed like an egg-shell amid the shattering masses."
Frank Hurley's images show broken masts and rigging and splinters of the ship. However Endurance 22 expects to find more than matchwood in their search.
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The old Norwegian sailing ship was designed to be a luxurious transport for polar hunting parties and tourists. Covered in hard Greenheart wood to deflect icebergs and built from solid oak, she was meant to be able to survive the pack ice of the southern ocean.
Scanning the Weddell Sea floor using LiDAR lasers and cameras the Agulhas will build up a picture of the wreck. Unmanned Saab submarines will dive to the 3km depths below pack ice. Nothing will be removed.
"The wreck is protected under the Antarctic Treaty. Our search is a non-intrusive search," says Lamont.
"From our imagery we want to make it accessible, in a way to say 'you do not need to go there and poke around."
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The window
Using the original last positions calculated by captain Worsley the Endurance 22 expedition has narrowed down a small search window in the 2.8 million square km of ice.
Although the accuracy and scarcity of the captain's entries make this more difficult, Lamont says it's an excellent head start.
"We do have the advantage that it isn't a vast area that we're expected to cover. "
More pressing is the time frame in which the expedition has to work.
Ice becomes thicker and the summer expedition window closes, there is only so long they can spend searching. This is made even more constrained by unpredictable ice and weather conditions.
The Agulhas II has to be back in Cape Town from the 12 March. While the crew can apply for extensions, the lenience is only about the length of time it takes to sail back to South Africa.
Given this fact, the Endurance must be found by the 12 of March or not at all.
Detour: Antarctica is a New Zealand Herald podcast. You can follow the series on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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