Endurance trapped in the ice.

In early January, we posted about two memorial Antarctic expeditions on the 100th anniversary of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s death. One of the expeditions, Endurance22, organized by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, hopes to locate, survey, and film the wreck of Endurance, Shackleton’s ship that sank after being crushed in Antarctic pack ice.  The expedition on the South African icebreaking polar supply and research ship, SA Agulhas II, is expected to depart from Cape Town, South Africa for Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, tomorrow, on 5th February 2022. 

Endurance was the three-masted barquentine in which Sir Ernest Shackleton and a crew of 27 men and one cat sailed for the Antarctic on the 1914–1917 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. She was launched in 1912 from Sandefjord in Norway. Three years later, she was crushed by pack ice and sank in the Weddell Sea off Antarctica. All of her crew survived. Shackleton may be best remembered for leading an epic 720-nautical-mile open-boat journey to a South Georgia whaling station to arrange for the rescue of his crew.

Onboard the SA Agulhas II a team of highly experienced extreme environment filmmakers will document the events in real-time and publish material on several digital channels and social media platforms. 

The expedition team will include leading polar scientists who will be conducting a range of studies of the ice and climate change related matters, advancing our knowledge of the Antarctic environment and global warming.  These include measuring and recording the sea-ice conditions, in order to develop a system that in time will provide continuous and automatic data of sea-ice conditions in the Antarctic, where currently very limited information exists.

Despite a century’s advances in technology, the expedition will face the same challenges encountered by Shackleton in attempting to operate in the brutal sea ice in one of the world’s most inaccessible locations.

“Believe me, it’s quite daunting,” Mensun Bound, the marine archaeologist who’s about to set out on yet another search attempt, told the BBC.
 
“The pack ice in the Weddell Sea is constantly on the move in a clockwise direction. It’s opening, it’s clenching and unclenching. It’s a really vicious, lethal environment that we’re going into.” 

To cope with the Antarctic conditions the expedition will be the first to use SAAB Sabertooth underwater vehicles to search for the wreck of Shackleton’s lost ship. These hybrid vehicles combine the attributes of a Remote Operating Vehicle (ROV) – always linked to the surface – and an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) – capable of operating without such a link.

When the vessel was crushed in the ice and sank in 1915, Captain Frank Worsley took detailed measurements of the location using a sextant and recorded it in his diary, which is now in the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) archives. Consequently, the expedition team knows where to focus its search efforts and, as long as it can get close enough to the vessel, aims to deploy the Sabertooths under the ice in order to try to locate the wreck.

The Sabertooths have the ability to reach sites up to one hundred miles away from the ship from which they are launched and to return with photos, video, and survey data. This means that even if the sea ice conditions are difficult, it may be possible for the expedition to survey the site of the wreck, even if the expedition ship SA Agulhas II cannot reach the location itself. 

Thanks to David Rye, Alaric Bond, and Dick Kooyman for contributing to this post.