The search expedition launched by the British foundation Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust announced in a press release on Wednesday that it had located and taken images of the wooden wreck.

"You can even read its Endurance name inscribed in an arc on the stern," he added.

The team of a hundred men had left Cape Town on February 5 aboard a South African icebreaker, with the aim of finding the wreckage before the end of the austral summer.

The helm of the ship is intact, equipment remained stacked as if the crew had just left the boat.

The framework, although damaged, is still standing.

None of the wreckage, classified as a historic site, was brought to the surface.

By the end of 1914, Endurance had left the British island of South Georgia in the South Atlantic to take the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition led by Shackleton.

- The white hell -

At the beginning of the 20th century, the conquest of the poles inspired many explorers.

Among them, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his plan to become the first man to cross Antarctica from end to end, from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea.

The adventure lasts two years and ends in failure, but Shackleton's epic in the white hell goes down in history.

After only a few months, the fragmented pack ice poses a problem: the ice is denser than expected.

In January 1915, the ship became trapped in the Weddell Sea, near the Larsen Ice Shelf.

Prisoner for months, the three-masted schooner of 44 meters is slowly broken and ends up sinking by 3,000 m deep.

Photo released by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust showing Endurance22 Expedition Director Menson Bound (l) and Expedition Leader John Shears with the SA Agulhas II in the background in the Weddell Sea in Antarctica on 20 February 2022 Esther HORVATH Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust/AFP

The expedition became legendary because of the survival conditions of the crew, who camped for months on the pack ice before it broke up, then found refuge on the inhospitable and icy Elephant Island, facing the Antarctic Peninsula.

But also because of the daring journey of Shackleton, who left in an Endurance canoe with a few companions to seek help as far as South Georgia, before returning to save his entire crew.

In this region, "the ice can become very thick, very quickly, and crush a ship (...) it does not forgive", explained to AFP Adrian Glover, biologist at the British Museum of Natural History, comparing the discovery to that of the Titanic.

A previous mission in 2019 had not made it possible to find the Endurance, recalled the South African Ministry of the Environment, owner of the icebreaker.

The research expedition, dubbed Endurance22, used state-of-the-art technology, including two underwater drones, to explore the area described by Shackleton himself as "the worst part of the worst sea in the world" due to its ice conditions.

Scientists also used the mission to study the effects of climate change.

Researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, Stefanie Arndt said on Twitter that she had collected "an incredible number" of 630 samples of ice and snow.

The crew must now begin an eleven-day voyage back to Cape Town.

Along with the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who in 1911 was the first man to reach the South Pole, the Australian Mawson and the Briton Robert Falcon Scott, Shackleton is one of the big names in the history of Antarctic exploration.

He died in January 1922.

© 2022 AFP