A New 3D Scan, Created from 25,000 High-Resolution Images, Reveals the Remarkably Well-Preserved Wreck of Shackleton’s Endurance

Pho­tos on this page cour­tesy of the Falk­lands Mar­itime Her­itage 

Few who hear the sto­ry of the Endurance could avoid reflect­ing on the apt­ness of the ship’s name. A year after set­ting out on the Impe­r­i­al Trans-Antarc­tic Expe­di­tion in 1914, it got stuck in a mass of drift­ing ice off Antarc­ti­ca. There it remained for ten months, while leader Sir Ernest Shack­le­ton and his crew of 27 men wait­ed for a thaw. But the Endurance was being slow­ly crushed, and even­tu­al­ly had to be left to its watery grave. What secures its place in the his­to­ry books is the sub-expe­di­tion made by Shack­le­ton and five oth­ers in search of help, which ensured the res­cue of every sin­gle man who’d been on the ship.

This har­row­ing jour­ney has, of course, inspired doc­u­men­taries, includ­ing this year’s Endurance from Nation­al Geo­graph­ic, which debuted at the Lon­don Film Fes­ti­val last month and will come avail­able to stream on Dis­ney+ lat­er this fall. “The doc­u­men­tary incor­po­rates footage and pho­tos cap­tured dur­ing the expe­di­tion by Aus­tralian pho­tog­ra­ph­er Frank Hur­ley, who [in 1914] brought sev­er­al cam­eras along for the jour­ney,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Sarah Kuta. “Film­mak­ers have col­or-treat­ed Hurley’s black-and-white images and footage for the first time. They also used arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to recre­ate crew mem­bers’ voic­es to ‘read’ their own diary entries.”

The fruits of an even more tech­no­log­i­cal­ly impres­sive project have been released along with Endurance: a 3D dig­i­tal mod­el “cre­at­ed from more than 25,000 high-res­o­lu­tion images cap­tured after the icon­ic ves­sel was dis­cov­ered in March 2022.”

As we not­ed at the time here on Open Cul­ture, the ship was found to be in remark­ably good con­di­tion after well over a cen­tu­ry spent two miles beneath the Wed­dell Sea. “Endurance looks much like it did when it sank on Novem­ber 21, 1915. Every­day items used by the crew — includ­ing din­ing plates, a boot and a flare gun — are still eas­i­ly rec­og­niz­able among the pro­tect­ed wreck­age.”

Endurance has, in oth­er words, endured. Its intact­ness — which “makes it look as though the ship,” writes CNN.com’s Jack Guy, “has been mirac­u­lous­ly lift­ed out of the Wed­dell Sea onto dry land in one piece” — is, in its way, as improb­a­ble and impres­sive as Shack­le­ton and com­pa­ny’s sur­vival of its fate­ful first expe­di­tion. The degree of detail cap­tured by this new scan (not tech­no­log­i­cal­ly fea­si­ble back at the time of the last acclaimed doc­u­men­tary on this sub­ject), should make pos­si­ble fur­ther, even deep­er research into the sto­ry of the Endurance. But one ques­tion will remain unan­swer­able: would that sto­ry have res­onat­ed quite as long had the ship kept its orig­i­nal name, Polaris?

via Smithsonian.com

Relat­ed con­tent:

The First Full 3D Scan of the Titan­ic, Made of More Than 700,000 Images Cap­tur­ing the Wreck’s Every Detail

How an Ancient Roman Ship­wreck Could Explain the Uni­verse

See the Well-Pre­served Wreck­age of Ernest Shackleton’s Ship Endurance Found in Antarc­ti­ca

Hear Ernest Shack­le­ton Speak About His Antarc­tic Expe­di­tion in a Rare 1909 Record­ing

New­ly Dis­cov­ered Ship­wreck Proves Herodotus, the “Father of His­to­ry,” Cor­rect 2500 Years Lat­er

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.