Wrecks, worms and wood: a scientific legacy of Shackleton’s Endurance

“I have been thinking much of our prospects,” Ernest Shackleton wrote in the austral spring of 1915, adrift in the Weddell Sea pack ice. Much of the same thinking crossed my mind in February 2018, when I awoke my cabin mate Thomas on the UK research ship James Clark Ross to tell him that I thought we too, were stuck in the Weddell. This notorious sea, famed and feared by Antarctic sailors for much of the 20th century for its relentlessly shifting, crushing pack was soon to do for our expedition too.

We were in Antarctica to study its remarkable marine biology. But being there, so close to the place where Shackleton’s Endurance went down it was impossible to not feel connected to that history. And Thomas and I had other reasons to think of the Endurance, and even wildly plot how it might be located and filmed. In 2013 we had published the results of a little experiment on what happens to wood on the deep seafloor of Antarctica. We showed that in Antarctica, the tiny ‘shipworm’ animals that eat wood in other oceans are simply not present. We concluded at the end of the paper that “our observations will have significance for marine archaeologists interested in the biodegradation of Antarctic shipwrecks such as the Scandinavian pine and oak-built ship Endurance used by Ernest Shackleton”.

We followed over the years the various expeditions mounted to search for the Endurance. With our own years of experience working in the Antarctic deep sea, I am afraid to say we rather discounted their prospects. It is astonishingly hard to find something on the seafloor without a precise position, and takes both luck and skill. This morning, I was happy to eat my words and marvel like along with everyone else at the remarkable images of the perfectly-preserved Endurance.

The wreck is important. It connects us directly to a historical event of true adventure and spirit. But now there is a scientific legacy too: Antarctica joins the Baltic and Black Seas as a shipwreck treasure vault. What else will we discover?

Dr Adrian Glover leads the Deep-Sea Systematics and Ecology Research Group at the Natural History Museum in London