For more than a century, the tale of the Endurance—Sir Ernest Shackleton’s famed Antarctic exploration ship—has been told as a story of heroic survival against impossible odds. The accepted narrative was straightforward: after months trapped in the Weddell Sea’s crushing pack ice in 1915, the Endurance finally succumbed when its rudder was torn away, dooming the vessel and setting the stage for one of history’s greatest rescue missions. But recent research is upending this myth, revealing that the real culprit may have been lurking in the ship’s very bones long before it ever set sail for the South Pole.
According to a new study published on October 6, 2025, in the journal Polar Record, the Endurance was structurally weaker than previously believed—a fact that was not lost on Shackleton himself. Dr. Jukka Tuhkuri, a professor at Aalto University in Finland and a veteran of the 2022 expedition that discovered the Endurance wreck at a depth of 3,000 meters, led the research. His findings, reported by CNN, IFLScience, and NPR, challenge the legendary status of the ship’s construction and cast new light on the decisions that led to its demise.
Shackleton’s own words, penned in his journal on October 27, 1915, capture the gravity of the situation: “She was doomed, no ship built by human hands could have withstood the strain.” By that point, the Endurance had been ice-locked since January, and the relentless pressure had torn off the rudder, ripped the keel, broken deck beams in the engine room, and punched holes in the sides of the boat. The crew’s ordeal—months adrift on the ice, culminating in a daring escape by lifeboat—has become the stuff of legend. Yet, as Tuhkuri’s research reveals, the seeds of disaster were sown much earlier.
“It was not a strong ship compared to other ships of its time, and it did not sink because of the rudder,” Tuhkuri told NPR. His investigation combined structural engineering analysis with a deep dive into historical records, including ship drawings, photographs, and personal correspondence. What he found was that the Endurance, though celebrated as the “strongest wooden ship of its time” when built in 1912, was riddled with design flaws that made it ill-suited for the Antarctic’s brutal pack ice.
The ship was originally constructed for Arctic summer tourism—specifically, for wealthy adventurers to hunt walruses and polar bears. It was never intended to brave the relentless compression of Antarctic pack ice. Its sturdy outer shell was designed to withstand collisions with floating ice floes, but it lacked internal diagonal support beams, a critical feature that braced other polar vessels against lateral pressure. “It was not designed to take pressure,” Tuhkuri explained to CNN. “When two ice floes collide with each other, they form what we call pressure ridges. They’re like small mountains, and they can be tens of meters thick.” The Endurance simply wasn’t built to withstand such forces.
Other design weaknesses compounded the problem. Tuhkuri’s paper, as summarized by IFLScience, notes that the Endurance had weaker pine deck beams and oak and pine frames than its contemporaries. Its unusually long machine compartment further weakened the hull. Most damningly, it lacked the diagonal bracing that Tuhkuri had previously recommended for another polar ship—the Deutschland—which survived months trapped in compression ice thanks to those very reinforcements.
Shackleton, it turns out, was acutely aware of these shortcomings. In a letter to his wife, Emily, he confessed that the Endurance was “not as strong as [his earlier ship] Nimrod constructionally” and that he “would exchange her for the old Nimrod any day now except for comfort.” This wasn’t idle grumbling. Years earlier, he had advised German explorer Wilhelm Filchner to add diagonal beams to the Deutschland, advice that likely saved that ship during its own icy ordeal. Yet, pressed by the looming threat of World War I and the need to secure funding, Shackleton purchased the Endurance—then called Polaris—in early 1914 and set sail for Antarctica on August 1.
By early 1915, the Endurance was trapped in dense pack ice about 100 kilometers from the Antarctic coast, drifting helplessly for months. As the ice tightened its grip, the ship was slowly crushed “like a soda can,” in the words of IFLScience. The final blow wasn’t the loss of the rudder, as Shackleton long maintained, but the tearing away of the keel—the “backbone” of the ship’s hull. This catastrophic failure broke the Endurance in two and sent it to the seabed, where it would remain undisturbed until its rediscovery over a century later.
Despite the ship’s flaws and the odds stacked against them, Shackleton and his 27 crew members survived. They endured months on the ice before making a perilous journey by lifeboat to safety. Their survival, as Tuhkuri emphasized, is a testament to their courage and unity. “I think the Endurance story is still a tale of triumph over disaster [...] Shackleton and all his men were brave and understood that by doing their part and helping the others, everybody can get back home,” Tuhkuri told IFLScience.
The new analysis doesn’t diminish the heroism of Shackleton’s expedition but adds a layer of complexity to the story. As Dr. Ross MacPhee, senior curator at the American Museum of Natural History, reflected to CNN, “Some decisions are not necessarily balanced decisions, because ambition very frequently trumps everything else.” In the early 20th century, polar exploration was a high-risk endeavor, with a death rate of about 3%—and risk-taking was often seen as part of the job description.
So, why did the legend of the Endurance’s invincibility persist for so long? Tuhkuri suggests that Shackleton’s extraordinary leadership and the crew’s survival overshadowed the ship’s technical failings. “Maybe Endurance was a strong and heroic ship in a poetic sense; in an engineering sense, unfortunately, it was not,” he wrote in his paper. When a figure becomes legendary, the stories that surround them can narrow our view, making it easier to accept the myth rather than question it.
The 2022 discovery of the Endurance wreck at a depth of about 3,000 meters in the Weddell Sea reignited interest in the saga and provided the impetus for Tuhkuri’s research. His findings, published in Polar Record, mark a significant shift in our understanding of one of the most famous shipwrecks in history. As the icy grip of the Antarctic continues to yield its secrets, the story of the Endurance reminds us that even legends are built on human choices—some bold, some flawed, but all irrevocably intertwined with the spirit of their age.
The Endurance’s fate, once attributed to a single twist of bad luck, now stands as a cautionary tale about the importance of preparation, engineering, and the hard limits of human ambition. Yet, the saga’s most enduring lesson may be that even when our best-laid plans are shattered, resilience and unity can still carry us home.
