At the beginning of February, an international expedition team set off for Antarctica to find Sir Ernest Shackleton's ship - the Endurance - which sank in the Weddell Sea in 1915. Three weeks after the start, the team was able to locate the previously lost wreck. Researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute were also on board.
Sir Ernest Shackleton originally set sail with the Endurance in 1914 to be the first to cross Antarctica. The route was supposed to lead from the Weddell Sea via the South Pole to the Ross Sea, but the ship got stuck in the thick pack ice of the Weddell Sea and finally sank after several months. The ship was considered lost ever since. 100 years after Shackleton's death, an international team led by expedition leader John Shears set out to find the wreck of the Endurance and was successful: at a depth of 3008 meters in the Antarctic Weddell Sea, within the search area that the expedition team had defined before leaving Cape Town, and about four miles south of the last recorded position.
The search window for the Endurance's location was the result of years of international research. Using a prediction model, scientists were able to recreate the ice drift in November 1915 and thus to analyze the conditions under which the ship sank between November 18 and 22, 1915. The actual position of the wreck matched the predicted one very well, allowing the team to eventually find it in the southern center of the search window. Much of the Weddell Sea region is covered by thick sea ice and massive permanent ice shelves and is difficult to access.
For three weeks, the expedition team searched for the Endurance using hybrid autonomous underwater vehicles from aboard the South African icebreaker S.A. Agulhas II. The researchers used the days following the discovery to examine, film and survey the wreck in more detail. The hull of the ship is completely intact and perfectly preserved. It is protected as a historic site and monument under the Antarctic Treaty, and was not to be touched or disturbed in any way during the exploration and filming work.
How AWI helped in the search
Researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) were also part of the expedition: Stefanie Arndt, Jakob Belter and Christian Katlein, as well as AWI photographer Esther Horvath.
"Finding the wreck was a great feat in polar underwater robotics. During the search, which lasted several weeks, several hundred square kilometers of seafloor were searched in 3000 meters of water depth," said Christian Katlein.
"Seeing the first images of the wreck has been very emotional and it is impressive and rewarding to see what we are able to achieve when people from different backgrounds and with different skill sets come together and unit in pursuit of a common goal," says Jakob Belter.
Stefanie Arndt adds, " When the Endurance was found, we were still working on the sea ice. Exactly where Shackleton and his men were standing more than 100 years ago - a goosebump moment!"
"For me as a photographer, it was a great honor to follow in the footsteps of Frank Hurley, who was the expedition photographer on the Endurance. Without his images we would not know what the 28 men really experienced and went through, it would only be an imagination in our minds based on the history we know," explains Esther Horvath.
Also on board was Lasse Rabenstein, CEO of the AWI spin-off “Drift+Noise”, a company that provides up-to-date ice information and supports ships in traversing the polar regions. The AWI researcher Helge Goessling and the SIDFEX project he works for provides very valuable ice drift forecasts for the floe selection. And Stefan Hendricks also from AWI sea-ice physics supports the expedition with sea-ice thickness data from the Cryosat-2 mission. The expedition is also receiving daily high-resolution satellite radar images from the German Space Agency (DLR). Additional to the diving experiments in search of the Endurance, the AWI team was able to collect sea ice data from a total of 17 ice stations, 40 ice cores and about 680 samples for further research.
Further informationen, pictures and videos
https://collect.wetransfer.com/board/sowc348bfrvti58ge20220307165300