In 1915, Captain Ernest Shackleton and his crew embarked on a harrowing journey no one ever dared to go on before: a land crossing of Antarctica.
As they were traveling to Antarctica, his ship the Endurance got stuck in ice and sank in the Weddell Sea. From there, Shackleton and his crew escaped on a life raft to a nearby island.
As interesting as the story of Shackleton’s voyage was, the story of the Endurance ship was even more intriguing.
The ship was thought to be “long gone” considering it sank in one of the most difficult regions to search for a wreck, the Weddell Sea.
The Weddell Sea is densely packed with ice which has made exploration of the region difficult, according to Britannica.
Remarkably, the shipwreck was found on March 9, about 106 years since the ship sank, after a month-long search organized by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, according to a March 9 The New York Times article.
“It's 10,000 feet deep in area, the Antarctic that's always covered in sea ice. And so it's just a very inhospitable environment to go trying to search for a shipwreck,” said Scott Hamilton, professor of Ichthyology at San Jose State University’s Moss Landing Marine Laboratory in a phone call.
Despite the temperature ranging from 50 to 28 degrees Fahrenheit, there are more than 9000 animal species in Antarctica, according to the non profit environmental advocacy group Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC) webpage.
However, much of the region’s wildlife is unknown, which is another reason why the discovery of the Endurance shipwreck is so unique.
“We still don't know a lot about the deep ocean. And the water is cold down there, just above freezing. And it typically is an area that doesn't have a lot of oxygen,” Richard Starr, Moss Landing Marine Laboratory faculty research member, said in a phone call. “So we are always amazed when we see flourishing biological communities in areas with really low oxygen and cold temperatures.”
Because of the cold water, the structure of the ship largely remained intact with the name of the ship still visible, according to a March 15 New York Times article.
With the Endurance’s structure in pristine condition, the ship acted as an artificial reef and attracted an abundance of marine life, some of which included species that had never been seen in the Weddell Sea.
“Artificial reefs can provide a structure for invertebrates to grow on to develop communities that are little functioning ecosystems, and that is one of the benefits, if you will, of putting structure on an otherwise flat, relatively flat, sea floor. . .” Starr said. “Because of the structure, they get them up off the bottom, where they might be smothered by sediment movements and keep them in relatively clean, clear, ocean water.”
One of the invertebrates, organisms that don’t have a spinal column, found living off the shipwreck were sea lilies, organisms with thin stalks and hair-like structures resembling flowers, according to a March 9 Vox article.
“The most important part of artificial reefs is that they provide a bunch of nooks and crannies for a bunch of different things to start hiding and then once those things are there, then they form the base of the food chain and then bigger fish start eating them and then bigger fish start eating the smaller fish,” Bri Sotkovsky, a grad student at the Moss Landing Marine Laboratory, said in a phone call.
“The life first to colonize the shipwreck, you know, that attracts more and more life to it…So yeah, I think the shipwrecks are good as artificial reefs because they'll be in the environment [for] a long time,” Hamilton said.
Because of the Antarctic treaty, no one is allowed to touch the shipwreck.
The Antarctic treaty was signed in 1959 by 12 countries, agreeing to protect the Antarctic area and only use it for peaceful and scientific purposes, according to Secretariat of The Antarctic Treaty webpage.
The Antarctic is facing the worst of global warming with more than 252 billion tons of ice melting, making these observations even more valuable, according to the ASOC webpage.
“The warming of the oceans and acidifying the oceans because of all the extra CO2 in the environment is a big challenge,” Hamilton said.
The ocean has absorbed about 40% of the extra CO2 in the atmosphere which has led to an increase in ocean acidification, according to the same ASOC webpage.
“Ocean acidification is mostly affected by the higher the temperature of the ocean gets the less dissolved oxygen in the West; the warmer that the ocean gets, the less oxygen it can hold,” Sotkovsky said. “And so there's less and less oxygen being able to be dissolved in the water, and so less creatures can live there as well.”
Hamilton said marine life is threatened by climate change which is detrimental to humans because much of the oxygen humans breathe comes from the ocean.
Approximately 50% of oxygen comes from the oceans, according to the U.S. National Ocean Service webpage.
The National Ocean Service provides data, tools and services that support coastal economies, according to its webpage.
In the icy Antarctic waters lies the Endurance- which has surely endured a lot and because of its ability to preserve its structure.
The sunken ship has allowed marine life to flourish, giving us all a chance to breathe more deeply.
“We just want our children and our grandchildren and everybody to continue to see life,” Stokovsky said. “It's just… it's pretty impossible for one creature like humans to live healthily in an unhealthy ecosystem.”
