Up-close images show ghostly Terra Nova wreck, ship of doomed Robert F. Scott voyage

ST. JOHN’S — A mission led by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society has captured detailed, up-close images of the ship that carried explorer Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed 1910 voyage to Antarctica.

The haunting wreck of Terra Nova lies at the bottom of the Labrador Sea, about 18 kilometres off the southern tip of Greenland.

The geographical society, in partnership with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, shared images Tuesday of the ship’s wide, ornate bow and two wheels. The images were captured as part of the organizations’ Heroic Age Expedition, which last week took them to the wreck of Quest, the vessel on which Anglo-Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton died in 1922.

In a way, the expedition is the final chapter of the stories of two of the most famous figures of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration, said John Geiger, chief executive officer of the geographical society.

“There aren’t large artifacts of their lives left, now that the last ships have been properly investigated,” he said in an interview Tuesday. “It’s a very special feeling, for sure.”

Scott sailed Terra Nova to the Antarctic in 1910, hoping to be the first to reach the South Pole. He and a crew spent several gruelling weeks trekking to the pole only to find Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten them to the punch.

Devastated, Scott and his crew turned around to head back to Terra Nova and sail home. But they’d made critical errors in their planning and they couldn’t reach their food cache, Geiger said. In 1912, searchers found some of their frozen bodies alongside Scott’s journals, which detailed their struggle.

Terra Nova was still intact, and it was ultimately put to work in Newfoundland’s sealing industry, Geiger said. It was based in St. John’s, N.L. for many years.

The wooden-hulled three-masted ship sank in 1943, after it was damaged by ice while ferrying supplies to Greenland naval bases with the United States military, according to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Shackleton is perhaps best known for his 1914 exploration trip to the Antarctic region aboard the Endurance, which got trapped in the ice and was eventually crushed. He and his crew survived on ice floes and then made their way to Elephant Island, off the east coast of Antarctica.

Geiger and his team members have been diving to the Quest and Terra Nova wrecks in the DSV Alvin, the first submersible to take people to the Titanic shipwreck. They set out from Woods Hole, Mass., on July 3 and have been at sea ever since, using the Atlantis research vessel as their home base.

While Quest was found draped in fishing nets and home to a wide variety of fish and other species, Terra Nova was mostly alone on the sea floor, Geiger said. Some of its features — its double helm, a piece of its upper deck — were clear and unmistakable, despite being submerged for more than 80 years, he said.

“The ships are decaying at a substantial rate, and there will be a time in the future when those ships will no longer be there,” Geiger said. “They will have become part of the sea floor.”

The team is using high-tech subsea technology from Voyis, part of Newfoundland-based Kraken Robotics, to survey the wrecks and build three-dimensional digital models of Terra Nova and Quest, which the public can explore. Geiger hopes the work inspires new generations of explorers, adding that there is still so much of the Earth yet to be known — especially in its oceans.

“I think there’s something really inspirational about people who try to understand the unknown,” he said of his affinity for Shackleton and Scott. “In a way, we’re at the cusp of another heroic age of exploration of the oceans, and of space.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 14, 2026.

Sarah Smellie, The Canadian Press