Its discovery 3,000 metres beneath the Antarctic ice in 2022 was nothing short of miraculous. But now, stunning images make it possible to see Ernest Shackleton's ship, Endurance, like never before. Released as part of a new documentary called Endurance, this model shows exactly what the ship would have looked like before it was lost to the ice in 1915. From plates used for the daily meals to the flare gun fired in tribute to the sinking ship, the scan reveals the minute details of life aboard Endurance. Nico Vincent, of Deep Ocean Search who developed the technology for the scan, told the BBC: 'It's absolutely fabulous.

Robotic underwater gliders will be sent to investigate the massive iceberg presently on a collision course with the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia, experts said. Dubbed A68a, the enormous mass -- some 87 miles (140 km) in length -- broke off from Antarctica's Larsen C Ice Shelf in 2017 and has been drifting north ever since. Scientists tracking the berg's progress via satellite warned that A68a -- propelled by the powerful circumpolar current -- could hit South Georgia within days. There is the chance that it could split into pieces beforehand -- MOD images taken from above the icy body have suggested that is already beginning to break up. But A68a is a hazard for wildlife -- having the potential to crush marine life on the island's ocean shelf and make waters inhospitable as it melts to release freshwater.

Stunning footage has revealed the first evidence that leopard seals share food -- with the marine mammals caught divvying up a penguin as they feast on their kill. The ground-breaking footage was captured by a drone flying off the coast of the island of South Georgia, in the southern Atlantic. Researchers said that leopard seals are normally regarded as being solitary creatures. The Antarctic predators are largely'intolerant' of each other, but can be forced to hunt alongside each another when congregating in areas of plentiful prey, the experts added. The leopard seal is named for its black-spotted coat, whose pattern is similar to that of the big cat, though the seal's coat is grey rather than golden in colour.

A team of scientists will for the first time search the wreck of polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton's doomed ship that was crushed in ice more than 100 years ago. Scientists on board the SA Agulhas II will leave for the Weddell Sea in Antarctica on New Year's day and head towards the Larsen C ice shelf. The team want to find and search Shackleton's lost Endurance vessel, which sank in 1915, with robotic submarines and drones. As part of one of the most ambitious polar expeditions in recent years, the scientists will also try and discover why a trillion tonne iceberg the size of Northumberland broke off the ice shelf and floated 28 miles (45km) last year. The team of experts, technicians and researchers are travelling to the region to study what pressures the shelf is under and what life survives in the extreme conditions.

Two years ago, a lawyer in Indiana sent me a check for seventy-eight thousand dollars. The money was from my uncle Walt, who had died six months earlier. I hadn't been expecting any money from Walt, still less counting on it. So I thought I should earmark my inheritance for something special, to honor Walt's memory. It happened that my longtime girlfriend, a native Californian, had promised to join me on a big vacation. She'd been feeling grateful to me for understanding why she had to return full time to Santa Cruz and look after her mother, who was ninety-four and losing her short-term memory. She'd said to me, impulsively, "I will take a trip with you anywhere in the world you've always wanted to go." To this I'd replied, for reasons I'm at a loss to reconstruct, "Antarctica?" Her eyes widened in a way that I should have paid closer attention to. But a promise was a promise. Hoping to make Antarctica more palatable to my temperate Californian, I decided to spend Walt's money on the most deluxe of bookings--a three-week Lindblad National Geographic expedition to Antarctica, South Georgia island, and the Falklands. I paid a deposit, and the Californian and I proceeded to joke, uneasily, when the topic arose, about the nasty cold weather and the heaving South Polar seas to which she'd consented to subject herself. I kept reassuring her that as soon as she saw a penguin she'd be happy she'd made the trip. But when it came time to pay the balance, she asked if we might postpone by a year. Her mother's situation was unstable, and she was loath to put herself so irretrievably far from home. By this point, I, too, had developed a vague aversion to the trip, an inability to recall why I'd proposed Antarctica in the first place. The idea of "seeing it before it melts" was dismal and self-cancelling: why not just wait for it to melt and cross itself off the list of travel destinations? I was also put off by the seventh continent's status as a trophy, too remote and expensive for the common tourist to set foot on. It was true that there were extraordinary birds to be seen, not just penguins but oddities like the snowy sheathbill and the world's southernmost-breeding songbird, the South Georgia pipit. But the number of Antarctic species is fairly small, and I'd already reconciled myself to never seeing every bird species in the world. The best reason I could think of for going to Antarctica was that it was absolutely not the kind of thing the Californian and I did; we'd learned that our ideal getaway lasts three days.