London, March 13 (BUS): The wreck of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship “Endurance”, which was crushed by Antarctic ice and sank about 10,000 feet (3,000 m) to the ocean floor more than a century ago, a team searching for it said Wednesday.
The three-masted schooner was lost in November 1915 during Shackleton’s failed attempt to make the first land crossing of Antarctica.
Previous attempts to locate the 144-foot wooden wreck, whose location had been recorded by Captain Frank Worsley, failed due to the hostile conditions of the ice-covered Weddell Sea beneath.
However, the Endurance22 mission, organized by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust and using advanced underwater vehicles called Sabertooths equipped with high-resolution cameras and scanners, tracked the ship’s remains.
Video footage showed the ship in remarkably good condition, with its name visible on its stern, according to Reuters.
“We have been inundated with our good fortune…,” said Minson Pound, the expedition’s director of exploration.
“This is by far the best wooden shipwreck I’ve ever seen. It’s upright, sea-floor proud, intact, and in fantastic preservation.”
The expedition – led by British polar explorer John Shears, operating from the South African ice-breaking ship Agulhas II and looking at the impact of climate change – found “endurance” four miles (six kilometers) from the site that Worsley recorded.
Although stranded on ice, the 28-man “Endurance” crew return home alive, and their stories are considered one of the greatest survival stories in human history.
They walked across sea ice, subsisting on seals and penguins, before sailing in three lifeboats and reaching the uninhabited Elephant Island.
From there, Shackleton and a handful of crew members rowed 800 miles (1,300 km) on the James Caird lifeboat to South Georgia, where they called for help from a whaling station.
On his fourth rescue attempt, Shackleton was able to return to pick up the rest of the crew from Elephant Island in August 1916, two years after the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition had left London.
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