Finding the lost ship Endurance under Antarctic ice

HostI was looking at those old grainy photos of the ship being slowly crushed by the ice. It looks so lonely out there, like a toy being snapped in half. After more than a hundred years in that freezing water, how did anyone actually manage to find it in such a huge, empty ocean?

GuestIt's one of those stories that feels like it should be impossible. The ship, the Endurance, is sitting at the bottom of the Weddell Sea. People who know the ocean call that place the worst sea in the world. It's not just the cold. It's the ice. Even now, with all our big metal ships, the ice there's thick and moves in circles, grinding everything in its path. To find it, a team had to go to the exact spot where the ice won the first time. They used a huge icebreaker ship to push through, but even that was a gamble. If the ice froze shut behind them, they would be stuck just like the original crew was in 1915.

HostBut if the ship sank over a century ago, did they even know where to start looking? I mean, they didn't have GPS back then.

GuestThey had something almost as good, but it was much harder to use. The man on the original crew who kept track of where they were was a real pro. He used a tool to look at the stars and the sun to figure out their spot on the map. When the ship finally went under, he wrote down the numbers. But here is the problem. The ice they were standing on was drifting. It was like trying to mark a spot on a moving rug. For a long time, people thought those old notes might be miles off. But when the search team finally got down there with modern gear, they found the ship was only about four miles away from where that guy said it would be. That's an amazing bit of math for a guy freezing his toes off on a piece of floating ice.

HostFour miles still feels like a lot when you're looking through miles of dark water. How do you actually see anything down there?

GuestYou don't use your eyes, at least not at first. You use sound. They sent down these long, thin underwater drones. These things look like yellow torpedoes. They swim back and forth near the sea floor and send out sound waves. The sound hits the bottom and bounces back, and the drone builds a picture from those echoes. If the bottom is flat mud, the picture is boring. But if there's a big, wooden shape sticking up, it glows on the screen. The team spent weeks doing this, just watching these wavy lines on a monitor, hoping for a bump that looked like a ship.

HostThat sounds like a lot of waiting around. Did they run into any trouble with the drones? It seems like a lot could go wrong two miles down.

GuestOh, it went wrong. At one point, they lost touch with the drone. Imagine spending millions of dollars on a high-tech robot and it just stops talking to you while it's under a thick sheet of ice. They had to wait for it to follow its own plan and pop back up in a tiny patch of open water. If it hit the ice from below, it was gone. But it made it. And when they finally saw the first real photos from the cameras on those drones, everyone lost their minds. The ship wasn't just a pile of wood. It was standing upright. It looked like it could sail away if you just pumped the water out.

HostThat's the part I don't get. Wood usually rots or gets eaten. How does a wooden boat stay in one piece for a hundred years underwater?

GuestUsually, you would be right. In most parts of the ocean, there are these tiny critters called shipworms. They're not actually worms, they're more like clams with shells that can drill into wood. They can eat a whole ship until there's nothing left but the metal bits. But the water in the Antarctic is so cold that those wood-eating worms can't live there. There's no wood for them to eat naturally, because there are no trees in Antarctica. So, they never moved into that neighborhood. Without those worms, the wood just sits there. The water is also very dark and very still, so the ship stays in a sort of deep freeze.

HostSo it's just sitting there in the dark, perfectly fine. Does that mean we could see the stuff the crew left behind?

GuestYou can see everything. The cameras caught the brass letters on the back that spell out the name Endurance. You can see the wheel the captain used to steer. There are even boots and plates and bits of rope just lying on the deck. It's like a ghost ship. The paint is still there. Even the tiny holes where the wood-eating bugs usually go are missing. It's the cleanest wreck anyone has ever seen. It's a perfect time capsule.

HostIt feels like the ice finally decided to be kind after being so mean to them back then.

GuestThe sea just kept it safe in a place where nothing else could touch it.

HostThe name on the back of the ship is still as clear as the day the crew walked away and left it to the ice.