A ship searching for Ernest Shackleton's famous lost ship Endurance retraced the adventurer's voyage a little too closely, ending up stuck in the same patch of ice where the original vessel sank more than a century ago.
The SA Agulhas II, an icebreaker currently searching the Antarctic for the remains of the sunken ship as part of the Endurance 22 expedition, was sailing through the area where Shackleton and his crew were forced to abandon ship when they became trapped in ice.
In an ironic twist of fate, the expeditioners ended up getting more than they bargained for when it came to replicating Shackleton's experience, when the Agulhas found itself frozen into the ice of the Weddell Sea after temperatures plummeted overnight.
Historian Dan Snow, who is on board the Agulhas, told The Times, 'Clever people did say to me on the way, 'How do you know you’re not going to get iced in like Shackleton?' I said, ‘Don’t worry about that. We’ve got all the technology.’ But we are now iced in.'
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Thankfully, the Agulhas was equipped with more ways to free itself than Shackleton's ship was back in 1912, including powerful engines, mechanical cranes, and even aviation fuel to burn on the ice.
But escaping the clutches of the Antarctic also took some more creative thinking, with Snow sharing a video on TikTok of the ship's crew using one of the cranes swing a shipping container back and forth 'to try and create some movement.'
Thanks to the work of Captain Knowledge Bengu and his crew, the Agulhas managed to free itself from the ice after several hours, and is now back on the search for the Endurance, which is believed to come to rest in one of the least explored parts of the Antarctic Ocean.
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'Archaeology was never meant to be like this,' said Mensun Bound, the Endurance 22 expedition's director of exploration. 'We’re stuck and I’m cold and I want to get home. This is not good stuff.'
As cold as the situation was for the crew on board the Agulhas, it's just a taste of what Shackleton and his team experienced after losing their ship, with the crew having survived for months by camping on the sea ice, before eventually managing to launch lifeboats and sail more than 800 miles to the British territory of South Georgia, where they were rescued.
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Topics: World News, Antarctica