Endurance found9/12/2023 It is upright, well proud of the seabed, intact, and in a brilliant state of preservation." Portsmouth University marine zoologist Simon Cragg told BBC News that those organisms were likely to have been kept at bay by the cold waters around Antarctica - and indeed it seems that the wooden wreck is in a remarkable state of preservation."This is by far the finest wooden shipwreck I have ever seen. "They are the fine, slightly stingy fur that you find covers the bottles of boats very quickly," she said.īut researchers don't expect to find on the wreck any wood-eating bacteria, fungi or shipworms, which can quickly destroy the timbers of sunken wrecks. ![]() Other sea creatures on the Endurance wreck may be confirmed as researchers examine more of the high-resolution imagery from the autonomous underwater vehicles that found the wreck.Įssex University marine biologist Michelle Tasylor, who like Griffiths wasn't involved in the search for the Endurance wreck, told BBC News that the fan-like structure near the ship's wheel may be a type of hydroid - effectively a colony of tiny creatures that live together. Mayday! 17 mysterious shipwrecks you can see on Google Earth Century-old photos provide glimpse of historic Antarctic voyage In photos: Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf through time It's impossible for any light to reach such a depth, meaning that plants that rely on photosynthesis can't live there and so the animals on the wreck can only survive by eating other animals or feeding off the "marine snow" of dead algae, tiny animals and their waste that falls from the often-icy surface, where sunlight can penetrate for a very small distance. The wreck was found at a depth of almost 10,000 feet (3,000 meters) beneath the Weddell Sea, which is often completely covered by sea ice. He'd intended to begin a crossing of the entire Antarctic continent from the south coast of the Weddell Sea.īut he and his crew had to abandon the ship after it became trapped instead they made an extraordinary journey of survival across the ice on dog-sleds and the freezing seas by lifeboats, first to the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula and then to the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia. The Endurance was Shackleton's expedition ship. ![]() It was famously crushed in November 1915 by sea ice and sank to the bottom of the Weddell Sea during an expedition led by polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, after becoming surrounded by ice several months earlier. The wreck of the Endurance was discovered on Saturday (March 5) by searchers on board the South African polar research vessel Agulhas II. One species was found in 2006 on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, but this would be a first for the Weddell Sea on the eastern side, he said. The animal could be from the genus Munidopsis, which is known to have over 200 species, Griffiths told BBC News. Squat lobsters may look like lobsters, but they are actually more closely related to hermit crabs, according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. But the star of the show was the "squat lobster" seen in some photographs scuttling past a wooden porthole of the ship, which sank in Antarctica's Weddell Sea in 1915.
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