A Royal Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS) expedition has created detailed 3D digital twins of two shipwrecks that define the "Heroic Age" of polar exploration: Ernest Shackleton's Quest and Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova The Guardian. The 21-day mission, called the 2026 Heroic Age Expedition, departed Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts on July 2 under the direction of RCGS chief executive John Geiger Canadian Geographic.

The team deployed Alvin, a crewed submersible operated by WHOI that visited the Titanic wreck four decades ago, to conduct dives on both sites The Guardian. Imaging equipment from Canadian firm Voyis captured thousands of high-resolution photographs at each location. Rather than processing the data later in a lab, the team assembled the images into photorealistic 3D models on site. The mapping covered not just the hulls but also the debris scattered across the seabed, showing researchers how each vessel broke apart and came to rest Canadian Geographic.

Quest rests more than 1,000 feet (305 metres) down in the Labrador Sea off Canada's coast. The ship sank in 1962, four decades after Shackleton's death aboard it in 1922—the explorer suffered a fatal heart attack at age 47 while anchored off South Georgia, en route to what would have been his fourth Antarctic expedition. RCGS located the wreck only in 2024 during a prior survey also led by Geiger The Guardian. This year's dive marks the first systematic imaging effort, with the team spending three days surveying and mapping the wreck RCGS.

Terra Nova, which carried Scott's Antarctic party southward, sank in 1943. Scott reached the South Pole on January 17, 1912, roughly a month after Roald Amundsen's Norwegian team had already arrived. Scott and his four-man south polar party died during the return march. By pairing these two ships in a single expedition, the mission connects the two explorers most closely associated with the British-led "race to the pole"—rivals during their lifetimes, now both transformed into high-fidelity data sets on the same survey.

The expedition's stated aim was to document both wrecks without disturbing them CBC. Digital twinning avoids the physical retrieval or disruption that earlier maritime archaeology sometimes demanded. Instead, it produces a navigable, dimensionally accurate model that researchers, museums, and the public can study indefinitely without further intrusion on the site. Smithsonian Magazine, previewing the mission before departure, described it as an effort to preserve two wrecks linked to rival voyages using the same non-invasive method Smithsonian Magazine.

The technical case for this approach is clear: deep-sea wrecks deteriorate, currents shift, and access via crewed submersibles is expensive and rare. A digital twin captured once, at sufficient resolution, serves as a permanent record even if the physical site is never visited again. What's more striking is the choice of vessels. Quest and Terra Nova are not equally famous—Terra Nova's role in Scott's polar tragedy has long overshadowed Quest in popular memory. Yet pairing them on one expedition places two competing national mythologies of exploration under the same imaging protocol, treating them identically as data rather than as narrative.

WHOI's announcement, issued July 8, highlighted the Quest imaging as the mission's primary achievement WHOI, while RCGS's release centered the technology used to obtain it. The Guardian's July 15 account, the most recent and complete public reporting, connects both wrecks and both institutions' roles, drawing detail directly from Geiger and the RCGS team rather than from a peer-reviewed publication.

No peer-reviewed paper has yet accompanied the imaging data release, and neither the Guardian's account nor the earlier statements from WHOI, RCGS, or Canadian Geographic indicate when the digital models will become publicly available or in what form. That gap—between an institutional announcement and a formal archaeological record—is worth noting as the project moves from expedition to publication.