News
The Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust (FMHT) is proud to announce the debut of the first-ever 3D printed model of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance, to be unveiled at the prestigious Future Labs exhibition.
‘This landmark showcase’, says Elena Lewendon, COO of the FMHT, ‘is part of the renowned Goodwood Festival of Speed. It highlights how cutting-edge scanning, AI and visualisation technologies are revolutionising access to some of the world’s most remote and fragile heritage sites.’
At its heart is a remarkable 3D-printed model of Endurance, built using ultra-precise scan data captured during the Endurance22 expedition. Alongside it, interactive touchscreens invite the public to explore the wreck for themselves, navigating across the ship’s deck and seabed to uncover artefacts frozen in time.
The decade-long search to find Endurance was followed by an extraordinary effort to bring her story back to the surface without ever disturbing the wreck. More than 25,000 high-resolution photographs were carefully stitched together using photogrammetry, a technique that builds 3D models from overlapping images. These were combined with data from laser scans to reveal the wreck exactly as it lies on the seafloor, right down to the grain in the ship’s timbers. Special colour correction techniques were then used to restore natural light to this deep-sea world, revealing how Endurance would look in daylight and highlighting features that would otherwise be lost in the pitch-black depths of the Weddell Sea.
‘This new standard of digital reconstruction’, says Saul Pitaluga, Chair of the FMHT, ‘opens wrecks like Endurance to the public, scientists and students around the world, offering a powerful new way to explore, study and safeguard fragile underwater heritage.’
Thanks to Voyis and Deep Ocean Search for their work to capture and deliver groundbreaking 3D images of Endurance, enabling unprecedented exploration and study.
Future Lab, Goodwood Festival of Speed
10–13 July, West Sussex
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10–13 July, West Sussex
Join our newsletter to hear about future exhibitions and all the latest Endurance news.