It’s one of the greatest Antarctic stories ever told: Sir Ernest Shackleton’s doomed attempt to cross Antarctica that was thwarted when his ship Endurance was crushed in the ice, followed by the long and desperate struggle to get his men safely home.
For over a century, the wreck of Endurance lay hidden from the outside world, but in March 2022 it was announced that the ship had been found lying 3000 metres below the forbidding ice of the Weddell Sea, after a quest almost as epic as Shackleton’s original expedition. But more than two years later, what has been happening with the wreck? Will it be possible to visit it or recover artefacts from the ship? What have we learned about its condition? In July 2024, the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust published its long-awaited Conservation Management Plan for Endurance, so we spoke to Camilla Nichol, the Trust’s CEO, to find out more.
Shackleton’s ship
The Endurance story begins on the eve of the First World War, when Sir Ernest Shackleton sailed south on his third and most ambitious expedition to Antarctica. His aim was to be the first to cross the entire Antarctic continent, but the venture was thwarted from the outset. Sailing through the little known Weddell Sea, Endurance became stuck in pack ice and drifted for nearly ten frozen months before being crushed in November 1915.
After the sinking, Shackleton’s men spent a further five months camping on the ice before making a desperate run in three lifeboats to the desolation of Elephant Island – the first land they had set foot on for nearly 500 days. From here, Shackleton and five others made one of the world’s greatest small boat voyages, sailing 800 miles through winter storms to South Georgia to raise the alarm. After four rescue attempts, all his crew were eventually brought back to safety.
The story of Endurance has excited armchair adventurers ever since. For decades, the impenetrable ice of the Weddell Sea guarded the secrets of the Endurance, but in 2019 the first serious attempt was made to locate it, using an icebreaker and state of the art unmanned submersibles. Although that attempt was unsuccessful, three years later, many members of the same team returned to the ice as part of the Endurance22 expedition, organised and funded by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust. On March 5 2022, the wreck of Endurance was found, perfectly preserved and almost completely intact, garnering massive international media attention. With the strange poetry of history, the ship was discovered exactly one hundred years to the day that Shackleton himself was buried in South Georgia after he died during his final expedition to Antarctica.
Protecting the wreck
The thick ice of the Weddell Sea and the cold waters that lie beneath it have so far offered the wreck of Endurance the best protection it could hope to receive. But that may not always be the case, so the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust, alongside Historic England, were tasked with drawing up a Conservation Management Plan for the ship. Camilla Nichol explained to me why the plan was needed now:
‘The CMP is a plan for the future. Yes, the site is pretty inaccessible, it is stable and there are few live immediate risks, but a warming climate changes that – it makes the site more accessible, it may mean colonisation of organisms which can damage the fabric of the wreck and change the water chemistry which at the moment is stable and preserving the wreck.’
Nichol also noted that while the Endurance22 expedition pushed their undersea technology to the limits to discover the wreck, it’s not difficult to envisage a time when submersibles may be able to more easily access the site, making it all the more important to ensure its future integrity is protected. ‘The CMP sets out now the guidance for protecting the site, so that if and when any of these conditions change, the protections are in place… it is very much a future-looking document, as all heritage management must be.’
The CMP consists of six main pillars to protect Endurance well into the future. The first and most important is that all future activity related to Endurance should aim to preserve or enhance the significance of the site, with a presumption that any future activities be purely non-invasive. In short, that means that in contrast to other famous wrecks like Titanic, there should be no recovery of artefacts from Endurance at all. This also rules out any fanciful ideas that one day the wreck might even be raised from the sea floor.
Visiting Endurance or studying it?
Endurance has already been declared a Historic Site and Monument under the Antarctic Treaty, but the CMP proposes extending the protected area around the wreck from a 500m radius to 1500m.
This has implications for any future expedition cruise ships that may have the capability of visiting the site – an increasingly popular request among Antarctic travellers. Nichol was keen to stress that the polar cruise industry has been quick to buy into the plan.
‘The International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (IAATO) were involved in our planning from the start and ever since the wreck was found in 2022 have advised all of their members to not plan activities above or below the surface in the vicinity of the Endurance wreck,’ she said.
Another key pillar of the CMP focusses on recording and conserving the biodiversity and ecology around Endurance. One of the thrills of the first images of the wreck was seeing how it had been colonised by a wide variety of marine fauna. It’s a prospect that Nichol finds particularly exciting. ‘[The wreck’s] role as an artificial reef in a poorly studied area of the ocean will have marine biologists rapt. Already species have been identified as firsts for the Weddell Sea and species which indicate this could be a vulnerable marine ecosystem.’
Better understanding the environment that Endurance sits in will also be a crucial element of the CMP, putting the wreck in its wider environmental context. ‘The insights that can be drawn about how the Weddell Sea is responding to climate change will be hugely valuable,’ said Nicholl, underscoring the science-led approach of the plan.
Into the future
The final parts of the plan for Endurance aim to capitalise on the international media attention that surrounded its discovery – by maximising the opportunities to increase public understanding and awareness of Endurance. The Endurance22 team completed a 3D laser scan of the ship when it was discovered, with the results of the survey due to be released later in 2024, along with a feature-length documentary about the expedition. To ensure that everyone can engage with the Endurance story, the plan proposes that all research data should be held publicly available in an archive – all the better to keep this astonishing story alive.
Though it seems incredible now, Shackleton was a largely forgotten figure in the public imagination for much of the 20th century, his achievements overshadowed by the drama of Scott and Amundsen’s fateful race for the South Pole. The discovery of the wreck in 2022 brings a new opportunity to preserve this astonishing heritage for future generations, especially in a time of warming oceans and thinning ice. All stakeholders have their part to play, Nichol concludes – including those travelling south on Antarctic cruises:
‘Operators can raise awareness of the need to protect the site, and enable their guests to understand the significance of Endurance and the need for the international effort to ensure its preservation into the future. Climate change is the biggest risk of all, and we all must do everything we can to reduce our environmental impact.’
