Famed Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance sank more than a century ago and its wreckage remains undiscovered at the bottom of the Weddell Sea as of March 2022.
Now, the team behind its discovery has joined with an Oscar-winning film crew for a new National Geographic documentary showing how they discovered the ship’s final resting place.
“Endurance” consists of thousands of 3D scans shot by 4K cameras deployed to a depth of 3,000 meters (9,843 ft). It premiered at the London Film Festival last weekend before being released in theaters and then on Disney+.
The never-before-seen footage captures everything from a flared gun and the man’s boot to the dinnerware used by the crew and recognizable parts of the ship.
“We were absolutely amazed,” Manson Bound, exploration director of the 2022 Discovery team, told AFP.
“We didn’t expect to see the ship’s wheel – the most symbolic part of the ship – just standing there, upright.”
History broadcaster Dan Snow, executive producer of “Endurance”, called it an “astonishing achievement” that it was found in such an “astonishing condition”.
“No one has ever found a wooden shipwreck, 3,000 meters below the ice in one of the most remote places on Earth,” he said.
“It is important because it connects the story of Shackleton and the 1914-16 expedition to one of the greatest stories ever told – a story of leadership and survival like no other.”
‘I’ll take the cake’
Anglo-Irish explorer Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition was intended to be the first land crossing of the frozen continent.
But its three-masted wooden sailing ship Endurance fell victim to the dangerous Weddell Sea, becoming stuck in pack ice in January 1915. It slowly scuttled and sank after 10 months.
Shackleton, who died in 1922, described the site of the sinking as “the worst part of the worst sea in the world”.
He cemented his status as a legend of exploration by leading himself and his 27 companions on foot on ice and then in boats to the British overseas territory of South Georgia, about 1,400 kilometers (870 mi) east of the Falklands. shored up. ,
Jimmy Chin, who jointly directed and produced the new film with Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, said, “I believe of all the great survival stories I’ve ever heard, this one is the best because it involves so many people. Are.”
The husband-and-wife team behind the Oscar-winning film “Free Solo” saw the campaign, organized by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, as an opportunity to “bring the story to a new generation.”
The documentary alternates between accounts of the original and 2022 missions, as modern-day explorers conduct dozens of abortive deep-sea dives using state-of-the-art submersibles as the evacuation deadline approaches before the onset of winter.
Bound noted the various challenges facing the latter-day team, including technology, research, and climate, with one being reminiscent of what Shackleton’s men had faced.
“Snow, ice and snow,” he said, adding that the documentary clearly highlights the “brutality” of the conditions they faced.
“This is probably the hardest project I’ve ever been involved in… It wasn’t called Unattainable Tolerance for nothing, was it?”
‘Great payoff’
Expedition leader John Shears also said that there was a “real similarity” between the two attempts and that like Shackleton he was ready for “the final polar challenge”.
“More people have been to space orbit than have walked on surface sea ice, where Endurance sank,” said Shears, who previously led an unsuccessful effort to find the wreckage in 2019.
Chin and Vasarhelyi said that combining the two stories was challenging but that they were complementary.
“Both stories, even though 110 years apart, speak to each other,” Vasarhelyi said.
“They both describe this fundamental human condition of daring to dream big…along with ambition, there is also the hard work, determination, patience and ingenuity to make it happen.”
To tell the original story, they chose to use AI to capture the diary entries of Shackleton and six crew members in their voices, based on other recordings.
The filmmakers also used restored and colorized photographs and film campaign footage taken by Frank Hurley.
But audiences will have to wait until the documentary’s finale to see Endurance’s reimagining – a choice Weiserhaly admitted he felt was “terrible” but necessary.
“It was a great story that paid off, but you have to earn it, right?” she explained.
“The cool thing is that the movie actually plays into this introduction… and it creates this amazing moment.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
