Incredibly, after 107 years and under 10,000 feet of water, Sir Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance has been found. The story of Shackleton's expedition and survival is one of the greatest in history. Shackleton, wanting to be the first to cross the Antarctic on foot, the Endurance became trapped and crushed in the Antarctic ice floes, and it was about 1 1/2 years before being rescued. The first I heard about it was from the company I worked for, they gave all the employees a book about leadership, called Shackleton's Way. There's movies and books about their ordeal, and is very much worth checking out. Here's a link to a BBC article about finding the ship. Endurance: Shackleton's lost ship is found in Antarctic
Amazing how well preserved it is. The antarctic region has no forests, and apparently no wood destroying critters. The only pictures of the ship were black and white, the B/W pic is from 1914. It's interesting to compare these two pictures. The steering mechanism, with the chains wrapped around and hanging. The railings.
No oxygen down that deep so nothing to react with. Salt is a great preserver and that wood was treated with something to begin with. probably too deep for barnacles and such to live at so nothing was eating the wood.
Amazing. Also amazing is when one considers what they had, or didn't have to work with in their journey.
What is so amazing is the clarity of the water to take pictures. When I think of some of the pictures of the Titanic, it looked like it was snowing over the ship.
Exactly, and to survive for 1- 1/2 years in that environment, on a drifting ice floe that eventually split in half, a grueling escape by boat. Amazingly, all the crew members survived.
10,000 feet is almost 2 miles deep! Another thing that is amazing, the original crew left such good records to know almost exactly where to look for the ship. It did take the researchers over 2 weeks to find the ship wreck, but that's searching 2 miles deep. And they were going off records from 1915.
Here's a good National Geographic documentary that includes a lot of actual photos and video of the expedition. It's also amazing they were able to document everything so well, and it survived. It shows the them stuck in the ice, their efforts to free the ship, the ship being crushed and the masts falling apart.
