The last shipwreck of the famous Anglo-Irish explorer Shackleton was found off the coast of Canada

street. JONES, Newfoundland (AP) — The wreckage of the last ship belonging to Sir Ernest Shackleton, the famous Irish-born British explorer of Antarctica, has been found off the coast of Labrador in Canada, 62 years after it disappeared. The wreck was found by an international team led by the Royal Geographical Society of Canada.

The Quest was found using sonar scans on Sunday evening, sitting on its keel under 390 meters (1,280 feet) of cold, undulating water, the association said. Her towering mast lay broken beside her, likely cracked when the ship drifted into the depths after striking ice on May 5, 1962.

“I had heard that some Americans were interested in finding Quest, and I had this image in my mind of a few billionaires on yachts, out in the Labrador Sea,” said John Geiger, Shackleton Quest expedition leader and chief executive of the expedition. The Royal Geographical Society of Canada told an audience at Memorial University’s Marine Institute in St. John’s, Newfoundland, on Wednesday.

“We did it the right way. It’s not about anyone’s ego, it’s about telling great stories and celebrating some of humanity’s finest qualities,” Geiger said.

He described the Quest as a ship of great historical importance.

Shackleton’s death on board the ship in 1922 marked the end of what historians consider the “heroic age” of Antarctic exploration. The explorer led three British expeditions to the South Pole, and was in the early stages of a fourth expedition when he died of a heart attack. He was 47 years old.

The Norwegian-built Quest was a steamship with a schooner, and was purchased by Shackleton specifically to travel to Canada’s High Arctic, Geiger said. But the Canadian government of the time canceled those plans, and Shackleton decided to sail again to Antarctica.

He died while off South Georgia, east of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean.

After the explorer’s death, Quest was used for Arctic research and then returned to its original intended use as a seal ship. It sank in 1962 after being damaged by ice in the Labrador Sea during a whaling voyage.

Geiger said the ship appeared to be in “incredible condition” despite sustaining damage when it hit the seabed.

He added that it will not be released to the surface, because that would be too expensive, but will be documented and studied carefully. The crew will likely head out sometime before the end of the summer to begin capturing footage of the ship using a remotely operated vehicle.

In 2022, Researchers discovered another of Shackleton’s ships, the Endurance In 10,000 feet – about 3,000 meters – of icy water, a century after it was swallowed by Antarctic ice.

A team of marine archaeologists, engineers and other scientists used an icebreaker ship and underwater drones to locate the wreck at the bottom of the Weddell Sea, near the Antarctic Peninsula.

The Endurance22 expedition set off from Cape Town, South Africa, in early February on a ship capable of cutting through ice 3 feet (1 meter) thick.

The team, which included more than 100 researchers and crew members, deployed underwater drones to comb the seabed for two weeks in the area where the shipwreck was recorded in 1915.

Shackleton never achieved his ambition of becoming the first person to cross Antarctica via the South Pole. In fact, he never set foot on the continent during the failed endurance expedition, although he had visited Antarctica during previous voyages.