New Close-Up Images Reveal the Wreckage of Ernest Shackleton’s Last Ship, Now Draped in Discarded Fishing Gear and Teeming With Life

The vessel “Quest,” found in 2024 off the coast of northeastern Canada, has become a home for corals, anemones and fish. It also holds the leftovers from decades of commercial fishing that happened above it after it sank

Eli Stark-Elster | AAAS Mass Media Fellow

July 17, 2026 12:26 p.m.

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On September 17, 1921, Ernest Shackleton set sail on his fourth trip to Antarctica aboard a ship called Quest. The famed explorer planned to survey the coastline of an area called Enderby Land.

Neither he nor Quest would get the chance. During a stopover at the Southern Atlantic Ocean island of South Georgia in January 1922, Shackleton died of a heart attack. The crew attempted to continue the expedition, but sea ice near the southernmost continent prevented them from reaching their destination.

Over the next 40 years, Quest supported several Arctic expeditions, cleared underwater explosives during World War II and worked as a seal-hunting vessel. After sea ice pierced the ship’s hull in 1962, it sank off the northeast coast of Canada.

Since then, the wreckage of Quest has lain on the floor of the Labrador Sea, some 1,280 feet beneath the surface. Now, a team led by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS) in partnership with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has captured the first close-up underwater images of the famed ship, per a July 8 statement. Researchers photographed it with WHOI’s Falcon remotely operated vehicle and descended to the site in the human-occupied submersible Alvin.

Expedition leader and RCGS CEO John Geiger was in Alvin when it made the first dive to the wreck. “Suddenly, you see the bow of the ship coming out of the darkness and it emerging,” he tells CBC News’ Peter Cowan. “You start to think about Shackleton. You think about where that ship has been. It’s very moving.”

The vessel is largely intact and stands upright. The bow, deck and several portholes remain visible; the main mast lies nearby, and the smokestack has been bent forward. The area where the name Quest might once have been visible is missing. Through one of the wide holes in the deck, Geiger spotted a white enamel wash basin, reports Sarah Smellie of the Canadian Press.

Quest rests inside the Hawke Box, a region of the Labrador Sea that has been closed to bottom trawling, a commercial fishing tactic involving dragging a net along the seafloor, since 2002. But nets, floats and other fishing gear now blanket the wreck. The abandoned equipment—often called “ghost gear”—can ensnare animals, shed plastic and interfere with the study of archaeological sites long after it is discarded.

“The impact on the seabed is still there, and it will be there after 100 years,” expedition co-chief scientist David Mearns, a marine scientist at Blue Water Recoveries, a U.K.-based company that locates deep-water wrecks, tells Alexandra Pope at Canadian Geographic, which is owned by RCGS. Researchers had expected Quest to be in better condition, based on sonar scans collected two years ago when the ship was discovered.

Beneath the ghost gear, however, the ship has become an oasis for ocean life on the otherwise barren seafloor. Pink soft corals and anemones crowd the outer surfaces, while redfish and Atlantic cod swim around and inside the wreck. The researchers even found a spotted wolffish hiding within the ship.

For these marine animals, a shipwreck is a new habitat “literally falling out of the sky,” WHOI expedition biologist Kirstin Meyer-Kaiser tells Canadian Geographic. Quest is made of all sorts of different materials, since it underwent many renovations—like the philosophical Ship of Theseus—during its 45 years working at sea. Consequently, each section of the vessel offers a surface suited for distinct organisms, producing layers of biodiversity across the wreck.

Similar excitement followed the 2022 discovery of a more famous Shackleton ship, Endurance, beneath Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, an area explored by Quest’s crew after Shackleton’s death. Images revealed anemones, sponges, sea stars and a rare deep-sea squat lobster inhabiting the well-preserved vessel. “The ship is cool,” Huw Griffiths, a British Antarctic Survey marine biogeographer who was not involved in that expedition, told Vox’s Benji Jones at the time. “But look at those things living on it.”

As with Endurance, researchers plan to use thousands of overlapping photographs to create a digital version of Quest. It will allow scientists and the public to examine its remnants closely.

“This type of 3D modelling has only existed in ocean science for the last couple of years,” expedition co-chief scientist Dwight Coleman, of WHOI, says in the statement. The technology, he adds, offers new ways to investigate historic wrecks and bring them to life.

More than a century after Shackleton headed to Antarctica aboard Quest, the ship has once again become an instrument of exploration.

Eli Stark-Elster | Read More

Eli Stark-Elster is the AAAS Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellow at Smithsonian magazine. He is a PhD student in evolutionary anthropology at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on documenting the methods used to induce altered states of consciousness across cultures—he conducts fieldwork in southern Africa, where he studies the shamanic use of hallucinogenic plants and fungi. His writing and research has been featured on NPR, Psyche and the Conversation. He also writes on his Substack, Unpublishable Papers.