Nn the expedition team of the “Endurance 22” can still conclude its journey with a success story: The wreck of the Endurance, which sank around 100 years ago and with which Ernest Shackleton wanted to be the first to cross the Antarctic continent, might be found with the help of an underwater robot (AUV) – at a depth of a good 3000 meters at the bottom of the Weddell Sea. The project was an extremely ambitious one. Finding Endurance’s resting place was like filling a patchwork quilt, explains Lasse Rabenstein, the expedition’s chief scientist: “You always have to go with the ice. Its drift dictates how, where and when you work.” This made it difficult for the underwater team to systematically scan the search area from side to side.
Flashback: It is Saturday morning, March 5, 2022. About 80 percent of the study area has already been covered, but many “patches” are still waiting to be scanned by the AUV. Nervousness is growing on board as to whether the entire area can be searched in the time the ship has left. The study area was marked out in an area around historical coordinates, which are subject to great inaccuracy due to the circumstances at the time: Endurance Captain Frank Worsley was only able to determine the coordinates with his sextant in clear weather on November 18 and 22, 1915. However, the Endurance sank under cloudy skies on November 21, and Worsely was only able to estimate the supposed coordinates on the drifting ice floe followingwards. He thought the Endurance barely drifted south between the 18th and 22nd, which once more puzzles Lasse Rabenstein. According to endurance meteorologist Leonard Hussey, a strong north wind blew in those days, which should have translated into drifting ice.
The name of the sunken ship is still clearly legible.
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Image: dpa
This gave the South African meteorologist Marc De Vos the idea of using the “ERA-20” method provided by the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) on the Agulhas II to determine Antarctic wind data for November 1915. With this global weather data of the past for every point on earth one can perhaps reconstruct the earlier drift with modern methods, even if the estimates are only rough. With the help of the archives of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, expedition leader John Shears also organizes Hussey’s original historical records of the rough course of the weather, and the team at the start-up Drift+Noise feeds the collected data into their algorithm for determining ice drifts. The surprise: After November 18, 1915, the floe on which the Endurance began to sink might well have drifted further south than Worseley had assumed, but then following the 21st once more northwards, so that he did not notice the meandering swerve would. The good news: Despite this detour to the south, the study confirms the search window that was carefully selected in advance of the expedition.
While De Vos and Rabenstein are discussing this theory with the colleagues from the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) and the expedition leaders, the AUV is continuously searching and is now also scanning the “patches” in the southern investigation area that are missing anyway. It’s a historic day as it was exactly 100 years ago that Sir Ernest Shackleton was buried in South Georgia.
Several years following the Endurance Expedition, which was the last major expedition of its kind in the golden age of Antarctic exploration, Sir Ernest Shackleton had embarked on a smaller “oceanographic and sub-Antarctic expedition” with many of his faithful crew members. In 1922, this led him back to the whaling station in South Georgia, which he had reached six years earlier with a handful of men – following a dangerous sea voyage from Elephant Island, more than 1300 kilometers in an open lifeboat and a subsequent forced march over one to there unknown stretch of land. In 1916, once at the whaling station, he dispatched a ship to rescue the 22 remaining men on Elephant Island, the remote and uninhabited island where he and his crew were stranded many months following the Endurance sank. Shackleton’s adventurous rescue operation was successful and made history. Shortly following he reached the port of South Georgia once more in 1922, he died unexpectedly of a heart attack and was buried there on March 5, 1922 at the request of his wife.
