"She was doomed, no ship built by human hands could have withstood the strain."

When polar explorer Ernest Shackleton wrote this journal entry on October 27, 1915, his dreams of reaching Antarctica had been famously crushed — along with his ship, HMS Endurance. The vessel had been ice-locked since January in the Weddell Sea, and by October's end, the ice had torn off the rudder, ripped the keel, broken the deck beams in the engine room and punched holes in the sides of the boat.

The harrowing events that followed, with Shackleton successfully leading a daring mission to find help after the crew evacuated to an ice floe and the damaged ship sank, left perhaps the biggest impression on Antarctic exploration history. But new research is rewriting what's known about the root problem that led

See Full Page