On Oct. 27, 1915, after being caught and crushed by packed ice for nine months in the Weddell Sea off Antarctica, Ernest Shackleton and his crew abandoned the Endurance and their quest to traverse the frozen continent by land. The doomed ship drifted atop the ice for three more weeks before finally sinking.
For over a century, experts have put the blame for the ship’s demise on an ice floe overwhelming the rudder and creating a large gash in the vessel. But a study released Monday in the journal Polar Record contends that the ship, not the ice, was to blame. The Endurance was ill equipped for its mission, a flaw that Shackleton was aware of long before he launched to Antarctica.
Jukka Tuhkuri, an ice researcher and naval architect and author of the new study, was aboard Endurance22 with the team that discovered the wreck in 2022. As a side project, he began analyzing diaries, personal correspondences and the ship’s wreckage to find out why the Endurance sank.
A year and a half later he was staring at images of what had been described as the strongest wooden ship ever built in the archives of the Royal Geological Society in London. A hypothesis came to him.
“It’s not the ice, it’s the ship,” Dr. Tuhkuri said.
He noticed that the hull of the Endurance lacked the beams that would have given it enough brawn to endure an onslaught of crushing ice. As a result, the rudder, stern post and part of the keel were torn apart, causing the ship to fill rapidly with water.
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