Ernest Shackleton (1874-1922) almost reached the South Pole in 1909, although he lost the title of being first to get there to Roald Amundsen, who achieved that record in 1911. Shackleton then set his sights on being the first to traverse Antarctica from one side to the other, and for that project purchased the wooden excursion ship Endurance. He embarked on his grandly-named "Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition" on Dec. 5, 1914 from the small island near the tip of South America called South Georgia, intending to land at Vahsel Vay in the Weddell Sea, reach the South Pole, and cross to the other side with the aid of a second provisions-laying party.
It was a complicated and ambitious undertaking. Endurance got stuck in the ice in mid-January after nearly reaching Vahsel Bay, and Shackleton decided to wait on board the ship until the following spring, nine months later. Meanwhile, over the Antarctic winter, the drifting ice slowly moved the ship several hundred miles northwest until the following October, when the spring thaws began to exert extreme pressure on the hull.
On October 24, the hull broke, water rushed in, and Shackleton ordered the ship abandoned. The crew transferred to camps on the ice, and the ship finally sank on Nov. 21, 1915. This began a series of adventures for Shackleton and his men which would be too long to recite here, but eventually they made it back to something like civilization in August of 1916.
Now we fast-forward to 2022, when an equally daring expedition called Endurance22 found Endurance below 3000 meters of water (9900 feet) and did extensive photographic documentation of the wreck, which by international agreement will remain undisturbed.
The details of what they found about why the Endurance sank are described in a recent UPI report by Stephen Feller.
After the wreck was found, researcher Jukka Tuhkuri and his colleagues of Aalto University in Finland conducted an investigation into why Endurance sank. Even as long ago as the 1910s, shipwrights knew how to construct ships that would withstand the extreme pressures exerted by ice in the Antarctic. But as their analysis of documents such as ship's plans, diaries, and other sources indicated, Endurance wasn't built that way.
On the lowest deck, which contained the boilers and steam engine, there was only one beam that crossed the entire ship from one side to the other. Ships designed to withstand the compressive forces of ice normally had several such beams spaced along the length of the ship to resist the ice, which otherwise will crack a hull like someone squeezing an eggshell too hard. But that is apparently what happened to Endurance. Although it lasted nearly a year stuck in the ice, the stresses caused by the following spring's thaw exceeded its capacity to resist them, and it cracked and sank.
According to Tukhuri, Shackleton was aware that the ship he bought was built only for polar excursions and not what amounted to ice-breaking duty. The researchers even found a letter written by Shackleton, mentioning that he had recommended adding additional internal hull-bracing beams for another polar exploration ship that had got stuck in ice but didn't get crushed. Tukhuri speculates that Shackleton was in a hurry and bought the ship knowing it wasn't sufficiently braced, but hoping that he could avoid putting it in a situation where the missing beams wouldn't be needed. Unfortunately, that's not what happened.
Although he wasn't an engineer, Shackleton was making engineering decisions as he prepared for his grand expedition. Engineering is the application of limited resources to a technical problem, and that's exactly what Shackleton was doing. Sometimes the time and expense required to prevent a somewhat unlikely event from happening simply isn't available. Rather than abort the whole project, Shackleton decided to go ahead, trusting in his navigation skills and previous Antarctic experience to avoid disaster. But his gamble with the missing beams didn't pay off, and he had to rely even more than he expected to on his survival skills to get him and his crew off the ice and back to civilization.
Shackleton's ill-fated expedition reminds me of the Apollo 13 near-disaster, in which three astronauts were stranded in space on their way to the moon in 1970 by an oxygen tank that exploded when some damaged insulation resulted in an internal fire. The resulting damage led to a long series of improvised solutions to unexpected problems, which the astronauts carried out in coordination with the extensive NASA support staff on the ground. Like Shackleton, the Apollo 13 team never reached their goal, but simply getting back to civilization after the accident was a bigger triumph than even landing on the moon again.
Apollo 13's accident was caused by a manufacturing flaw, not a design flaw. Still, the improvisation and backup systems used to rescue the mission were similar to what Shackleton used in getting his crew back safely.
Most of us will never go on expeditions to unexplored lands or planets. But the civilizational urge is still there, which is why several countries continue to plan both manned and unmanned expeditions to the Moon, Mars, and even farther.
If and when these plans come to fruition, we can count on several things. One is that not everything will go according to plan. When engineers encounter a novel situation, despite all the advance information they can gather about it in advance, there is always something unexpected. Sometimes it's just a matter for curiosity, but other times it can be a matter of life and death.
Another thing is that good engineering practice and planning can provide enough backup resources to allow clever individuals to create a survival plan even in the face of a major disaster. Losing the Endurance was a big setback, but Shackleton had packed enough auxiliary supplies in the form of food, shelter, and other necessaries, so that he and his crew could perform the extraordinary feat of extracting themselves from what must have looked like certain death at times. And the ingenuity of NASA engineers combined with the intrepid actions of the Apollo 13 crew to get them safely home, despite major damage to the Service Module that contained the oxygen tank which blew up.
Companies such as SpaceX are now leading the way into space, and it remains to be seen how well they balance the goals of achieving a mission first at any cost, including death, versus proceeding more slowly with more backup systems and more thoughtful engineering. So far, none of the commercial space enterprises has ever lost a life in space. Let's hope it stays that way as long as possible.
Sources: The article "Shackleton's sunken polar ship may have been weaker than thought" by Stephen Feller was published on the UPI website on Oct. 6, 2025 at https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2025/10/06/shackleton-endurance-ship-crushed-in-ice/9321759774913/. The Endurance22 website is at https://endurance22.org/. I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on Apollo 13, Ernest Shackleton, and Endurance.
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