Endurance caught in the ice

It was a long-shot from the beginning. The Weddell Sea Expedition 2019 had dispatched the icebreaking polar-supply and research-vessel SA Agulhas II to study Antarctica’s Larsen C ice sheet. While in the area, the expedition attempted to locate Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, which sank after being crushed in the ice in 1915. Not only did they not succeed in the finding the shipwreck, but also lost the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) which was being used to conduct the search. 

CNN reports that an autonomous underwater vehicle, AUV7, was deployed earlier this month at the wreck site of the Endurance, which sank after the Antarctic ice enclosed and ultimately crushed it. But the vehicle, which the scientists had hoped would locate and photograph the lost ship, slipped under an ice floe and out of contact.

The expedition team undertook a round-the-clock rescue operation to recover the AUV. Weather conditions worsened, however, and the team was forced to abandon the search after several days — lest the polar research vessel S.A. Agulhas II, the expedition hub, meet a similar fate to the Endurance.

“As a team we are clearly disappointed not to have been successful in our mission to find Endurance,” said Mensun Bound, the director of exploration for the Weddell Sea Expedition 2019 group to the BBC.

“Like Shackleton before us, who described the graveyard of Endurance as ‘the worst portion of the worst sea in the world’, our well-laid plans were overcome by the rapidly moving ice, and what Shackleton called ‘the evil conditions of The Weddell Sea’.”