Plucky Robot Helps find Shackleton's Ship Endurance

IN LATE 1914, explorer Ernest Shackleton and 27 crewmen sailed into the icy waters around Antarctica. Their state-of-the-art ship Endurance stretched 144 feet, with three towering masts, its hull ultra-reinforced to resist crumpling in the floating ice. The crew’s plan was to hike across the frozen continent, but the sea had other ideas. Endurance got stuck off the coast and was slowly crushed by the floating ice, forcing the men into one of the most famous feats of survival in history. They endured for over a year, scurrying across ice floes to hunt penguins and seals, before reaching an uninhabited island. From there, Shackleton and a small party sailed 800 miles in a little boat rescued from the Endurance, made land on the island of South Georgia, and hiked to a whaling station, then returned by ship to pick up the rest of the crew.

Over a century later, scientists have now used another state-of-the-art vehicle to finally glimpse the long-lost wreck of the Endurance. Dangling from an icebreaker in Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, an underwater robot called Sabertooth dove almost 10,000 feet, painting the seafloor with blasts of sonar that betrayed the unmistakable form of a ship. Switching to the robot’s cameras, the crew captured video of a stunningly well-preserved wooden vessel. Sabertooth’s tether makes it unlike other Antarctic ocean robots, which tend to be fully autonomous; scientists give them orders to explore a certain area on their own. But Sabertooth is a hybrid robot, meaning that while it can autonomously roam the Antarctic seafloor, its operators can assume control as needed. That tether can’t provide power to the robot, since that would thicken the line and make it more prone to getting pushed around by currents.

The researchers knew roughly where to look because Endurance’s captain had logged the ship's last location. But he did so with early 20th-century methods, which were less precise than today’s GPS. And then it arrived: the unmistakable form of a shipwreck. (Unmistakable, at least, to a trained sonar analyst.) “You cannot imagine the faces of the people when we saw the Endurance for the first time,” says Vincent. But as bad luck would have it, there was only a minute left on the robot’s battery. “Immediately, we interrupted the dive to come back to the surface and recharge,” he says. No matter—the scientists had finally located one of history’s most legendary shipwrecks. When they returned with the recharged Sabertooth to get more footage, they found an astonishingly well-preserved wooden ship.



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https://www.wired.com/story/how-a-plucky-robot-found-the-long-lost-endurance-shipwreck/?mbid=social_twitter&utm_brand=wired&utm_medium=social&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=twitter