The search for the Endurance

In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton departed on board the Endurance, with the goal of making the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent. The route was meant to begin in the Weddell Sea, then cross the South Pole to the Ross Sea, but the ship became trapped in the dense pack ice of the Weddell Sea. After many months, it was finally crushed by the shifting floes and sank. In an unbelievable rescue mission, Shackleton managed to bring home his crew without a single casualty. But the shipwreck was never found.

Now expedition leader John Shears and his team hope to achieve something unprecedented: to find, film and survey the lost Endurance. Those on board the cutting-edge South African icebreaker S.A. Agulhas II include experts from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI): Stefanie Arndt, Jakob Belter and Christian Katlein, together with AWI photographer Esther Horvath and Lasse Rabenstein, CEO of the AWI spin-off “Drift+Noise”, a company that provides up-to-date ice information and supports ships in traversing the polar regions. The AWI researcher Helge Goessling and the SIDFEX project he works for provides very valuable ice drift forecasts for the floe selection. And Stefan Hendricks also from AWI sea-ice physics supports the expedition with sea-ice thickness data from the Cryosat-2 mission. The expedition is also receiving daily high-resolution satellite radar images from the German Space Agency (DLR).

The plan is to sail the S.A. Agulhas II directly to the region where the Endurance sank and deploy hybrid Autonomous Underwater Vehicles to search for the wreck at a depth of 3000m. If this proves infeasible, it will be up to the AWI researchers to draw on their experience e.g. from the MOSAiC expedition to help find a suitable floe. The expedition team will then set up camp on the floe, using it as a base for exploratory dives. Here, the major challenge consists in quickly finding a floe that will actually drift through the search area. While others are engaged in the dives, the AWI team will also collect scientific samples from the floe itself and attempt to deploy snow buoys that can gather valuable data for further research.

To date, very few ships have ventured into the area, which is predominantly covered with thick sea ice and massive, permanent ice shelves. Especially the heavy pack ice in the Weddell Sea makes the area difficult to reach. Expedition leader, John Shears, said: “The Endurance22 team are very confident that with the assistance of the experts from AWI and Drift+Noise we will reach the wreck site, despite the extreme weather and environmental conditions.

 To the website of the expedition Enruance22