Archaeologists have made hundreds of new finds on the wreck of HMS Erebus, the ship commanded by Sir John Franklin on his doomed Arctic trip 180 years ago. The team’s discoveries include pistols, sealed bottles of medicines, seamen’s chests and navigation equipment. These are now being studied for clues to explain the loss of the Erebus and its sister ship Terror, and the deaths of the 129 men who sailed on them.
I've read a lot about this expedition (both non-fiction and Dan Simmons' amazing horror novel based on the facts), and visited the Naval College at Greenwich to see the memorial to the lost men. It's a truly fascinating story.
The work is considered to be particularly urgent because the wreck of the Erebus – discovered 10 years ago in shallow water in Wilmot and Crampton Bay in Arctic Canada – is now being battered by increasingly severe storms as climate change takes its grip on the region.
Does climate change have to be shoehorned into everything in the 'Guardian'? Well, at least it's not covi...
Investigators’ efforts were made even more pressing by Covid-19, which halted all exploration in 2020 and 2021...
/facepalm
Virtually all this work has focused on the threatened Erebus. By contrast, Terror – which sank in deeper water about 45 miles away from the wreck of Erebus – is less at the mercy of the elements and was only visited briefly last year.
Time to explore that one too, then.
