Farsky shipwrecks6/25/2023 ![]() It’s rare on land to be able to uncover something that people never knew about. The public response to the discovery of Endurance highlights an enduring public fascination with shipwrecks, which Mearns attributes to “an innate curiosity to discover something and solve what isn’t known. Worsley’s navigational abilities provided everyone involved in the search for Endurance the confidence that the ship could be found but even so, the explorers would have delved deep into the records for as much supporting evidence as possible. Worsley guided the Endurance’s boats from the ice floe on which the crew was stranded to Elephant Island, where most of them waited while Worsley, Shackleton and four others took one of the boats to find rescue on South Georgia, which they reached after 16 days of battling storms and waves, all while Worsley methodically recorded their positions and plotted their course. Although Worsley was not, of course, able to record the ship’s position with the pinpoint accuracy granted by today’s GPS systems, his calculations carried considerable weight because of his deserved reputation as a master navigator. ![]() PHOTOS: See Images of the Endurance Wreck Discovered in the Weddell Sea Frank Worsley's Navigation Made Endurance Search Easierīut the Agulhas was able to target the approximate location in the first place because of diligent measurement-taking and recording by the Endurance captain, Frank Worsley, when the ship went down on November 21, 1915. When it arrived in the approximate location of the Endurance wreck, it deployed a robot called Sabertooth, which was able to descend 10,000 feet, using sonar to scan for the wreck and cameras to film it, all while the Agulhas blasted its propellers to keep the immediate area free of ice and its crew checked satellite data to guard against the ice’s encroachment. That vessel, the SA Agulhas, was built in 2012 to supply South Africa’s Antarctic bases and was perfectly equipped to fight its way through the notoriously challenging sea ice of the Weddell Sea, where Endurance had been crushed 107 years before.Īt 440 feet long and almost 13,000 tons, it is three times longer and 37 times heavier than the doomed vessel it found on the Antarctic seabed. The March 2022 discovery of the wreck of Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition ship Endurance owed a great deal to the use of cutting-edge technology and a search vessel capable of swatting aside ice with an ease of which Shackleton could only dream in 1915. “We can cover a lot of ground in terms of searching, we can expand the search area if the clues aren’t very good or vague, so it opens the door for more wrecks being found,” he says. These vehicles also enable explorers to expand their targeted search zones. In particular, Mearns notes, Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and Remote Operated Vehicles (ROVs) allow explorers to penetrate to almost any depth in the ocean. Once the research reveals ideal hunting ground, explorers have much better tools on hand to then carry out the search. ![]() The Endurance22 crew deploy a specially made underwater drone to search for the Endurance wreck in the Weddell Sea. “What I can do in an archive in a day used to take me at least a week or two, and that’s just the efficiency of the archives.” AUVs and ROVs Make the Searching Easier ![]() “A lot of records are being digitized so you don’t necessarily have to visit every archive yourself,” he says. That said, Mearns-who has found 26 major shipwrecks around the world- acknowledges that even painstaking research has become significantly easier. “If you do it professionally,” Mearns says, “the questions you ask yourself are: Can it be found? Can it be found in a reasonable time with a definable budget?” Generally, most wreck-finding missions begin with scouring through archives-before anyone goes to sea. WATCH: Ernest Shackleton’s lost ice ship found! Don’t miss Shackleton’s Endurance: The Lost Ice Ship Found. And secondly, underwater remote technology has advanced so that the actual work for searching for wrecks has become much more efficient. First, records around the world have been digitized and so are more easily accessed. Mearns, author of The Shipwreck Hunter: A Lifetime of Extraordinary Discoveries on the Ocean Floor, shipwreck hunting has become more fruitful for a couple key reasons. What’s behind the acceleration in discoveries?Īccording to David L. Most of them will never be found, but since the 2010s, searchers have been uncovering even the oldest and deepest wrecks. It has been estimated that three million shipwrecks lie scattered on the seabed around the world.
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