Researchers hope to find the lost ship of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton when they set off on a major international scientific expedition next year. Led by the University of Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI), and funded by the Flotilla Foundation—a Netherlands-based charitable trust—the Antarctic Weddell Sea Expedition is scheduled to take place from January to February 2019, as reported by the BBC. “If there are deep-water marine species colonizing the wreck, the marine biologists may try to obtain scientific samples using the [ROVs], if that can be deployed above the site from the ship,” adding “we will not remove any items from the wreck.”

At the Larsen C Ice Shelf, the ROVs will explore the cavity under the newly exposed shelf, map the seafloor, and investigate the overhanging ice canopy. But the latest group’s secret weapon is a fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that can travel for “tens of miles” in their hunt for the wreck, believed to be lying 10,000ft below the surface in the Weddell Sea off Graham Land. SPRI's director, Professor Julian Dowdeswell, chief scientist of the Weddell Sea Expedition 2019, told The Times that the Agulhas II expedition ship would be put to the test by the conditions. Scientists from London’s Natural History Museum said in 2013 that they believe the ship may have been protected from wood-boring worms due to the sea’s currents. It could be a better or worse sea ice year, so everybody is going into this with their eyes open.’

After the vessel became trapped in ice for 10 months and then sank, the explorer and his crew survived for six months before reaching uninhabited Elephant Island. When on Nov. 21, 1915 the polar explorer ship Endurance finally yielded to the Antarctic pack ice, Ernest Shackleton and his crew began one of the most gruelling survival attempts in history. Shackleton, himself from Kilkea, Athy, Co Kildare, and five other men, including Crean, then set sail again to seek help at a whaling station on the island of South Georgia, with their perilous two-week journey regarded as one of the most heroic feats of navigation. After three unsuccessful attempts, Shackleton finally rescued his men in August 1916.
The Scott Polar Research Institute announces a mission planned for 2019 to search for Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton's famed lost ship Endurance, which sank in 1914 leading to a multi-year rescue operation.