Search for Shackleton’s lost Endurance ship defeated by bad weather and bad luck

Antarctica [credit: Wikipedia]

It's hard to be too surprised by this news even though it's well into the Antarctic summer.

A British-led expedition to find the Endurance, Sir Ernest Shackleton's ship, has been defeated by horrendous weather and pack ice – the very conditions that trapped the explorer's vessel in Antarctica more than a century ago, reports the Daily Telegraph.

The expedition was called off on Thursday after "extreme weather conditions" led to the loss of an autonomous robotic submarine that, it was hoped, would have located the wreck.

The Endurance became trapped in pack ice and sank to the bottom of the Weddell Sea in 1915.

The expedition reached the wreck site earlier this week, relying on detailed records left by Frank Worsley, the captain of the Endurance, and deployed the submersible.

The underwater robot, known as AUV7, was on the final leg of a 30-hour mission, deep beneath the ice, when contact was lost between it and the expedition ship, the SA Agulhas II.

Running the risk of becoming trapped in the ice itself, as the Endurance was, the polar research vessel had to withdraw.

Frustratingly for the team, it is not known whether the submersible captured images of the Endurance wreck.

"As a team we are clearly disappointed not to have been successful in our mission to find Endurance," said Mensun Bound, director of exploration.

"Like Shackleton before us, who described the graveyard of Endurance as 'the worst portion of the worst sea in the world', our well-laid plans were overcome by the rapidly moving ice, and what Shackleton called 'the evil conditions of The Weddell Sea'."

Full report here.

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