The discovery of the Terra Nova shipwreck
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 31 March 2026
⏱️ 12 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2012, a team of researchers discovered one of the most famous polar shipwrecks - the Terra Nova.
The ship was famous for carrying Britain’s doomed explorers in their race to reach the South Pole more than a century ago.
It was later sunk - laying unseen on the seabed for decades.
Oceanographer Leighton Rolley tells Megan Jones how he and the rest of his crew used sound waves to find the hidden wreck.
Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by and curious about the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there.
For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more.
Recent episodes explore everything from how the Excel spreadsheet was developed, the creation of cartoon rabbit Miffy and how the sound barrier was broken.
We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: the moment Reagan and Gorbachev met in Geneva, Haitian singer Emerante de Pradines’ life and Omar Sharif’s legendary movie entrance in Lawrence of Arabia.
You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, like the invention of a stent which has saved lives around the world; the birth of the G7; and the meeting of Maldives’ ministers underwater. We cover everything from World War Two and Cold War stories to Black History Month and our journeys into space.
(Photo: The SS Terra Nova, Antarctica 1912. Credit: Royal Geographical Society/Getty Images)
Transcript
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