Royal Geographical Society via Getty Images An Endurance boat leaning over an Antarctic ice floe in 1914 (Photo by Frank Hurley/Royal Geographical Society via Getty Images)
EXPEDITION — “He is a hero to anyone interested in the polar world,” explorer Alban Michon told HuffPost at the start of the Endurance22 expedition last February. The wreckage of Endurance, Ernest Shackleton’s ship wrecked by ice in 1915 off the coast of Antarctica, has been discovered in the Wedell Sea at a depth of 3,000 meters, researchers said on Wednesday, March 9.
“We are very touched to have found and filmed footage from the Endurance,” Mensoon Bound, director of the Falklands Maritime Heritage Foundation’s research expedition, told the BBC. “Without exaggeration, this is the most beautiful wooden wreck I have ever seen. It is intact and in excellent condition,” he added.
“Finding the wreckage is an incredible feat,” polar geographer John Shears cheered the British media as he changed seas, blizzards and temperatures down to -18°C. We have achieved what many thought was impossible.”
legendary expedition
According to the discoverers, the wreckage was found about six kilometers from the site of the flood. The research expedition, numbering about a hundred people, left Cape Town on February 5 aboard a South African icebreaker, hoping to find the wreck before the end of the austral summer.
In August 1914, the Endurance left the port of Plymouth (England). There are 28 people on board, 69 dogs, a cat and food for two years. But after five months of navigation, the ship got stuck in the pack ice. Alone in this white desert, the crew must wait for the end of winter and the melting of their icy prison. The men obscure their logbooks with desperation.
But life on a ship is not only torture. “We have images of men playing football on an ice floe, it’s incredible,” Alban Michon recently enthused. Australian photographer Frank Hurley really immortalized these scenes of jubilation between crew members.
Finally, the southern summer comes, but instead of freeing the ship, the ice binds it. Viewers of the agony of L’Endurance, the men decide to give it up. Then they camp on the Antarctic ice for almost two years. It was not until April 1916 that Ernest Shackleton left to seek help with five of these men.
Another journey begins. The sailors spend 16 days crossing 1,300 km of ocean in a small boat to reach South Georgia Island, where they find help at a whaling station. They then return to rescue the remaining 22 men. This odyssey is the most famous of Ernest Shackleton’s works.
“Close the story of one of the most beautiful polar expeditions”
Since then, all attempts to find L’Endurance ended in failure, until today. The Endurance22 expedition used state-of-the-art technology, including two underwater drones, to explore an area that Shackleton himself called “the worst part of the worst sea in the world” due to its ice conditions.
For this very dangerous mission, the divers who were supposed to study the sunken ship received special training. “Training is being used to teach divers how to endure the cold, tinker underwater when they are at wreck level, and especially take out the robot,” Alban Michon detailed at HuffPost. This deep-sea exploration robot weighs almost a ton. “It’s only two or three divers and they’ll have to get him out if he gets stuck under the ice.”
“If the explorers discover the sunken ship, they will even have a chance to complete the story of one of the most beautiful polar explorations,” he concluded. Now it’s done.
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