Legendary Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance sank more than a century ago and its wreck lay undiscovered at the bottom of the Weddell Sea until March 2022.Now, the team behind its discovery has joined forces with an Oscar-winning film crew for a new National Geographic documentary showcasing how they located the storied vessel's last resting place."Endurance" features thousands of 3D scans shot by a 4K camera deployed to a depth of nearly 10,000 feet.It premiered at the London Film Festival last weekend before its release in cinemas and then on Disney+.
The never-before-seen footage captures everything from a flare gun and man's boot to dinnerware used by the crew and identifiable parts of the vessel."We were absolutely blown away," Mensun Bound, the 2022 discovery team's director of exploration, told AFP."We didn't expect to see the ship's wheel -- the most emblematic part of the ship -- just standing there, upright." History broadcaster Dan Snow, an executive producer on "Endurance", called finding it in such a "stunning state" an "astonishing achievement"."No one's ever found a wooden shipwreck 3,000 metres down in one of the most remote places on earth underneath the ice," he said."It's important because it is connected with this story of Shackleton and the 1914-16 expedition, which is one of the greatest stories ever told -- a story of leadership and survival like nothing else."The flare gun that was discovered was fired by Frank Hurley, the expedition's photographer, as the ship was lost to the ice, the BBC reported.
"Hurley gets this flare gun, and he fires the flare gun into the air with a massive detonator as a tribute to the ship," expedition leader John Shears said."And then in the diary, he talks about putting it down on the deck.
And there we are.We come back over 100 years later, and there's that flare gun, incredible."Anglo-Irish explorer Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition was meant ...