Shipwreck Endurance is still ‘bold and beautiful’ after a century in Antarctic waters

The wreck of one of the world’s most legendary exploring ships was just found in icy waters off Antarctica — and the pictures from the expedition are incredible.

The discovery comes more than 100 years after the ship Endurance was crushed by sea ice, leaving explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew to find an alternate (and brutal) route home. The ship’s final resting place was discovered by the expedition Endurance22, which used high-tech underwater search vehicles to find and document the wreck.

“In a long career of surveying and excavating historic shipwrecks, I have never seen one as bold and beautiful as this,” Mensun Bound, the expedition’s director of exploration, wrote in a blog post.

Detailed records kept by Endurance’s captain Frank Worsley during the 1915 expedition helped the team narrow down the search area. The wreck was found on March 5th, just four nautical miles south of its last known location. It was found 3008 meters (9868 feet) under the surface of the icy Weddell Sea.

The Endurance was in gorgeous shape, with paint still visible on parts of the ship. While there is some damage (as would be expected from a ship that was crushed in sea ice), features like the ship’s wheel and the iconic name are still remarkably intact. Since it is considered a historic site, nothing on the wreck was touched — it will be left as-is on the seafloor.

“It would appear that there is little wood deterioration, inferring that the wood-munching animals found in other areas of our ocean are, perhaps unsurprisingly, not in the forest-free Antarctic region,” polar biologist Michelle Taylor of Essex University told the BBC. She identified the organisms seen in the images of the wreck as “stalked sea squirts, anemones, sponges of various forms, brittle stars, and crinoids (related to urchins and sea stars).”

The team used an underwater vehicle called the Sabertooth, made by SAAB, to find the wreck. The Sabertooth can work either attached to the ship via a tether, or autonomously, traveling up to 100 miles away from its ship. Even if the mission’s icebreaker, S.A. Agulhas II, couldn’t get close to the wreck site, it could send a Sabertooth under the ice to investigate.

Equipped with a high-definition camera and sonar, the expedition’s vehicles were specially designed to locate and map the wreck site. A laser scanner on board will map the wreck in enough detail to create a 3D model of the site. The data is expected to let researchers see the site with a “level of accuracy comparable to that of an archaeological survey on land,” according to the expedition’s website.

During the search for the Endurance, other researchers on the expedition were monitoring and measuring sea ice, making detailed maps of the ocean floor, and testing engineering limits in some of the harshest conditions on Earth.

A documentary of the expedition is expected to premiere on National Geographic this fall.