A Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust expedition on Saturday discovered the wreckage of Anglo-Irish explorer Sir. Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance 10,000 feet below the surface of Antarctica's Weddell Sea, 107 years after it sank during Shackleton's famous, ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, BBC News reported early Wednesday. The ship sank in 1915 after getting stuck, then crushed, in sea ice, starting a long and heroic survival quest.
"Without any exaggeration this is the finest wooden shipwreck I have ever seen — by far," marine archaeologist Mensun Bound, part of the FMHT expedition, told BBC News. "It is upright, well proud of the seabed, intact, and in a brilliant state of preservation." The expedition used a South African icebreaker, Agulhas II, and it took two weeks for its remote-operated submersibles to find the sunken ship.
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