At the start of the 20th century, there was a frenzied race between explorers to reach the South Pole.

And the team led by Ernest Shackleton almost won the prize.

But he got to, what was it, 97 miles of pole, and he stopped.

And he stopped because he knew that on the way back, men would die.

It's Tuesday, January 16th. It's the 150th anniversary of Shackleton getting a pretty cool consolation

prize. And this is Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski. The geographic South Pole was elusive

during the Nimrod expedition of 1909, but Shackleton's team did reach the magnetic South Pole was elusive during the Nimrod Expedition of 1909, but Shackleton's

team did reach the magnetic South Pole, or at least an estimate of where it was at the time.

Five years later, his crew took off on another Antarctic mission that also somehow averted tragedy

and left a mystery for modern explorers to discover.

Ira Flato brings us this conversation from March of

2023 about the discovery of the endurance. There are few stories about heroic survival equal to

Ernest Shackleton's daring rescue of his entire crew that turned disaster into triumph. In August of

1914, 28 men set sail from England to Antarctica, led by Shackleton.

They had hoped to be the first to cross the isolated continent by foot.

However, their ship, the endurance, became stuck in the ice, was crushed, sank to the bottom of the frigid Antarctic waters, leaving most of the men stranded

on cold, desolate land. Shackleton, with five of his crew, set out in a small boat to bring help from

hundreds of miles away, and finally, after many months of fighting the cold, frostbite, and the

angry seas, Shackleton was able to rescue all of his men with no loss of life.

Over the years, there have been attempts to find the endurance shipwreck, but none were successful

until literally a year ago when the endurance was located for the first time since it sank

back in 1915. Menson Bound is a maritime archaeologist,

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