The story of the Endurance shipwreck is one of the most remarkable survival tales in the history of exploration, highlighting the endurance and courage of Ernest Shackleton and his crew during their expedition in the early 20th century.
In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton, set out on the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, aiming to be the first to cross Antarctica from sea to sea via the South Pole. The Endurance, a sturdy, three-masted ship, left England in August 1914, just as World War I was beginning. After a long voyage through the icy seas, the ship reached the Weddell Sea in January 1915, but then disaster struck. The ship became trapped in pack ice in the Weddell Sea before reaching the continent. For ten months, the crew lived aboard the ice-bound ship until it was crushed and sank in October 1915.
Stranded on the ice, Shackleton and his men camped for months before taking lifeboats to Elephant Island. With no chance of rescue there, Shackleton and five others made an 800-mile journey in a small lifeboat to South Georgia Island, enduring treacherous seas. After reaching the West side of the Island, Shackleton had to cross the island’s mountains on foot to reach a whaling station. From there he organised a rescue mission. Miraculously, all 28 men were saved in August 1916, despite the extreme conditions they faced.
This survival story is a legendary example of leadership, resilience, and human endurance.
The Endurance22 Expedition
In 2022, a team of historians/marine archaeologists, scientists and engineers/technicians went back to the Weddell Sea on board a modern polar research ship, S.A. Agulhas II, with the aim to locate the exact position of the Endurance shipwreck. Their main technology to help them in this mission was a remote controlled Autonomous Underwater Vehicle/Submarine (AUV) used to scan the seabed more than 3,000m below sea level! With only a vague idea of where the shipwreck could be, they spent around 20 days scanning a fairly large area (approx. 125 nautical miles) of the Wedell Sea, only being able to scan a small surface per day.
You can find our more about this expedition on: https://endurance22.org/ and on this BBC article.
Your Challenge
Your challenge is going to help control the remote-controlled submarine (AUV: Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) by programming some instructions to help the AUV scan the ocean floor one step at a time and hopefully locate the Endurance shipwreck.
To do so, you will need to complete the code provided below. This code has already been started for you but is incomplete and does not cover the whole area to be searched today. You can run the code to see which sections of the seabed are already being covered. You will then be able to complete the code further to cover the whole search area.
Extra Challenge:
Once you have found the shipwreck, challenge yourself by tweaking your code to complete the following exploration paths:
Solution...
The solution for this challenge is available to full members!Find out how to become a member:
➤ Members' Area
LMC Simulator
Logic Gates Circuits
Network Designer
Flowchart Studio
Online Python IDE
