After an 11-day voyage aboard a South African icebreaker, the expedition, known as Endurance22, reached the Weddell Sea in Antarctica and began searching for one of the most celebrated wrecks yet to be found – Ernest Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance.
As CBC News Canada so aptly describes Shackleton’s voyage; after the ship became trapped in the Weddell Sea’s pack ice and sank, the crew’s fight to survive has become one of the epic adventure stories of its age.
Thanks to the accuracy of Endurance’s captain and navigator, Frank Worsley, the ship’s location when it sank is known, but it lies under the floating ice of the Weddell Sea, some 3,000 meters (10,000 feet) below the surface.
This week, underwater drones equipped with cameras, sonar, and lasers have been scanning 100 square miles of seafloor looking for the remains of the 144-foot wooden ship.
Mensun Bound, a marine archaeologist and the expedition’s director of exploration, said in an email that after a few technical glitches, the submersibles were functioning well, carrying out several dives each day, reports the New York Times.
So far, the images show that the seafloor is flat and consists of fine sediment and small rocks. “It should be possible to identify quickly any wreckage,” he said.
The wreckage, if found, will probably not be intact. Photographs of the Endurance taken in 1915 show how badly the crushing forces of the Antarctic ice damaged the ship before it sank.
Studying the Weddell Sea’s pack ice
Onboard the Agulhas II are sea ice researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), the German Aerospace Lab (DLR) and Drift+Noise Polar Services (an AWI spin-off company).
Besides providing ice navigation support, they will be undertaking a program of sea ice monitoring and measurements, looking for signs that it is changing as the world warms as a result of human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases.
Two helicopters aboard the ship have been used to ferry these scientists to ice floes, where ice cores are drilled for later laboratory analysis. Sea-ice cores (1 to 5 meters long and 10cm wide) will be taken from selected ice floes using electric-powered ice-coring devices as well as snow samples.
Additionally, four ‘snow buoys’ will be deployed to selected ice floes. The snow buoys are designed to measure the small-scale variability of snow thickness. For this purpose, each buoy is equipped with ultrasonic sensors that measure the distance to the surface.
By calibrating a buoy using the snow depth measured during deployment on the ice, it is possible to continuously calculate the change in snow depth. In addition, the air and surface temperature, as well as the air pressure is recorded.
