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The wreckage of the Endurance was found in Antarctica 106 years after the historic ship was crushed and sunk in an ice floe by explorer Ernest Shackleton during an expedition.

A team of adventurers, marine archaeologists and technicians has used submarine drones to locate the wreck at the bottom of the Weddell Sea east of the Antarctic Peninsula. Struggling with sea ice and freezing temperatures, the crew had been searching for more than two weeks in an area of ​​150 square miles where the ship sank in 1915.

The Endurance, a 144-metre, three-masted wooden ship, is respected in arctic history for unveiling one of the greatest survival stories in the history of exploration. Its location at a depth of nearly 10,000 feet in waters that are among the iciest in the world has placed it among the most famous shipwrecks ever to be found.

The discovery of the wreck was made by the search expedition in a statement Wednesday, endurance22.

“With the discovery of Endurance, we made our way into arctic history and successfully completed the world’s toughest shipwreck search,” said John Shears, the expedition’s leader.

The first images of the ship since those taken by Shackleton’s photographer Frank Hurley have revealed parts of the ship in startling detail. An image of the stern showed the name “ENDURANCE” above a pentacle, a relic from before Shackleton purchased the ship that was named Polaris. Another showed the aft deck and the ship’s wheel.

A video provided by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, organizer of the expedition, showed the bow and sections of the deck and hull.

Mensun Bound, the expedition’s director of exploration and a marine archaeologist who has discovered many shipwrecks, said Endurance was the best he had ever seen. Dik is clean from the seafloor and is in “excellent state of preservation,” he said.

The ship was found about four miles south of the last location recorded by Shackleton’s captain and sailor Frank Worsley. The search was conducted over a wide area to account for faults in Worsley’s navigation equipment.

The Endurance’s relatively pristine appearance was not unexpected, given the cold water and lack of wood-eating marine organisms that lead to shipwrecks elsewhere in the Weddell Sea.

Mr Bound also described the wreckage as “solid”. Although photographs of Hurley before sinking showed extensive damage and collapse to the ship’s mast and rigging, and damage to the hull, Mr. Bound expected most of the ship to be in one piece.

The exploration video showed what appeared to be broken masts and damage to the decks.

The wreck hunt, which cost more than $10 million and was provided by an anonymous donor, was carried out by a South African icebreaker. Left Cape Town in early February. Aside from a few technical glitches with the two subs and a part of the day covered in ice when operations were suspended, the search went relatively smoothly.

The battery-powered submarines swept the seafloor twice a day for about six hours at a time. They used sonar to scan part of the smooth seabed, looking for anything rising above it. When the wreckage was found a few days ago, the equipment was replaced with high-definition cameras and other tools to make detailed images and scans.

Under the terms of the six-year Antarctic Treaty aimed at preserving the area, the wreck is considered a historical monument. The submarines did not touch him; images and scans will be used as the basis for educational materials and museum exhibits. A documentary is also planned.

Shackleton left England with a crew of 27 in Endurance in 1914 and set out for a bay in the Weddell Sea, which was supposed to be the starting point for he and a small group of people to cross Antarctica for the first time. This was near the end of what is known as the heroic age of Antarctic exploration, which included the marches of Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian who first reached the pole in 1911, and Robert Falcon Scott, a later deceased Briton. arrives after a month.

Shackleton never made it to the pole or beyond, but his leadership in rescuing his entire crew and his heroism, which included an 800-mile open-boat journey across the dangerous Southern Ocean to the island of South Georgia, made him a hero in England. .

Shackleton was stumped by the famously thick, long-lived sea ice caused by a circular current that held up a lot of ice inside Weddell. In early January 1915, Endurance was stuck less than 100 miles from its target and drifted through the ice for more than 10 months as the ice slowly crushed it.

When the ship was damaged, the crew camped on the ice and lived on the ice until it dispersed five months after the ship sank.

Although ice conditions have been milder than usual in recent years, the Weddell Sea is still much more icy than other Antarctic waters. That was the case this year, and it helped the expedition team get to the search site more easily and stay there safely. Icebreaker Agulhas II left the search area on Tuesday for the 11-day cruise to Cape Town.

In addition to the expedition team, several ice researchers were on board, including Stefanie Arndt of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. Studying how Antarctic sea ice may change as the world warms due to human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, Dr. Arndt and others have spent a lot of time in ice drilling cores. He said on Twitter on Monday that they had collected 630 samples from 17 locations, which he called an “incredible number”.