First, one longshot goes in, then another and another. But Aurora has lost steam, and they don’t have the same long distance shooting skills. Aurora makes a 2-pointer, and their opponent responds with one as well, 12-12. Like most matches, both teams start off with high intensity, making fast breaks and steals. By the end, no brow is dry.Īurora Borealis is a local team, comprised of, in their words, “three engineers and a postman,” from South Hill who are competing in the Men’s over 30, under 6-foot bracket. In Hoopfest though, that’s more than enough to test every player’s endurance. Incredible.Twenty-five minutes usually doesn’t feel like a long time. “This is something that we see one time in a life-only one time. It's like she sunk yesterday,” says Vincent. “The level of preservation of this wreck is absolutely, absolutely gorgeous. Vincent has been at this kind of work for decades and has seen hundreds of shipwrecks, but none quite like this. But Antarctica is devoid of trees, which means there aren’t organisms in its surrounding waters that have evolved to break wood down for nutrients. A vessel made of wood is supposed to quickly rot, thanks to microbes and critters called shipworms, which grow up to 5 feet long as they chew through wood. Ironically enough, the harshness of the Antarctic seas both sank Endurance and preserved it like no other shipwreck. In the video above, you can clearly see the ship’s name splayed across the stern, one of the broken masts, and even the wheel. The Antarctic Treaty protects this shipwreck as a historic site and monument, so the explorers could only look, not touch. “It's a huge achievement-from the historical point of view-for the story of Shackleton and his crew, as well as an extremely strong achievement from the technology point of view, because it was probably one of the most complicated shipwrecks to discover,” says Nico Vincent, subsea project manager of the expedition, which was organized by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust. Switching to the robot’s cameras, the crew captured video of a stunningly well-preserved wooden vessel. Dangling from an icebreaker in Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, an underwater robot called Sabertooth dove almost 10,000 feet, painting the seafloor with blasts of sonar that betrayed the unmistakable form of a ship. Over a century later, scientists have now used another state-of-the-art vehicle to finally glimpse the long-lost wreck of the Endurance. From there, Shackleton and a small party sailed 800 miles in a little boat rescued from the Endurance, made land on the island of South Georgia, and hiked to a whaling station, then returned by ship to pick up the rest of the crew. (Do yourself a favor and immediately read Alfred Lansing’s book on the expedition.) They endured for over a year, scurrying across ice floes to hunt penguins and seals, before reaching an uninhabited island. Endurance got stuck off the coast and was slowly crushed by the floating ice, forcing the men into one of the most famous feats of survival in history. The crew’s plan was to hike across the frozen continent, but the sea had other ideas. Their state-of-the-art ship Endurance stretched 144 feet, with three towering masts, its hull ultra-reinforced to resist crumpling in the floating ice. In late 1914, explorer Ernest Shackleton and 27 crewmen sailed into the icy waters around Antarctica.
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