"Men are wanted for a dangerous journey, low salary, extreme cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, no return with life, honor and recognition in case of success." This was the announcement by words that the British Ernest Shackleton published in the Times, in 1914, in order to recruit heroes to join the Endurance crew, to the most fantastic expedition to Antarctica of all time.
The vessel sank in 1915, crushed by sea ice that blocked it in the Weddell Sea and sank in an area 3,000 meters deep. Now it is intended to send another fantastic expedition to find the Endurance, which disappeared in that epic.
Endurance
Shackleton and his crew of the so-called Transatlantic Imperial Expedition, which aspired to be the first to cross overland Antarctica, were forced to use lifeboats to make a break through the Southern Ocean, until they were rescued, without a single casualty , on the island of South Georgia.
The British researcher Julian Dowdeswell will lead the international expedition, scheduled for January or February 2019. However, this is not the main mission of this expedition, but a sencudaria: the priority will be to visit and study the Larsen C ice shelf, which Last July she gave birth to one of the largest icebergs ever recorded in Antarctica.
According to Dowdeswell, director of the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) in Cambridge:
In our Larsen study, we will operate autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). But if we can place them where they think Endurance is, we'll send them under the ice to conduct a survey. They are equipped with multiple-beam echosounders that look down, which can trace the shape of the seabed in a grid.