‘I got goosebumps’ at Endurance’s discovery
In today’s newsletter, we talk to a witness of an extraordinary undersea discovery, dive into Ireland's ‘hell caves’, come face-to-face with a devil in the jungle, meet the world’s first celebrity chef … and cheer for Angola’s most honored athletes.
“Standing there, I got goosebumps.” Esther Horvath felt tears welling as she watched the discovery of polar explorer Ernest Henry Shackleton's ship the Endurance, sunken for more than a century under off the coast of Antarctica.
Horvath, the only photographer on the discovery expedition, was stunned as an underwater drone camera—10,000 feet below—got closer to a vessel that appeared intact (pictured above). “The ship looked like it sank yesterday,” Horvath recalls in this week’s Overheard, the Nat Geo podcast.
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Overcoming adversity: The 1915 sinking of the Endurance (shown above last March) stranded Shackleton and his explorers on floating sea ice as they attempted to cross the Antarctic on foot. Shackleton and his crew, in a show of mettle that enraptured generations of explorers, managed to escape Antarctica to safety. Read more.
STORIES WE’RE FOLLOWING
• Inside the Irish ‘hell caves’ where Halloween was born
• Why is tuberculosis killing off this zoo’s lemurs?
• Solved: The prehistoric creature behind a 115-year-old fossil mystery
• Who founded India’s first great empire?
• What archaeologists are learning about the ‘real’ Jesus
• Far from home, a Latin American author found a surprisingly familiar new home in the U.S. Midwest
• Having trouble sleeping? There’s a science to it.
PHOTO OF THE DAY
Face-to-face with the devil: It’s nocturnal, has six spiny legs, and is omnivorous, meaning it doesn’t have a problem chowing down on other insects. The devil katydid (Panacanthus cuspidatus), featured in a recent post on Nat Geo’s Instagram, is “one of the most unreal insects I've photographed in the Ecuadorian Amazon,” says photographer Javier Aznar.
Related: Portraits of new and unusual insects discovered in the Amazon’s canopy.
THE NIGHT SKIES
Catch Saturn now: Tonight the ringed planet is on display, joined by a beautiful gibbous moon. The pair are visible rising as soon as an hour after sunset. On Friday, stargazers with binoculars may be able to spot the super-faint blue dot of Neptune passing just three degrees north of the moon. By Saturday evening look for an eye-catching pairing between Jupiter and the moon. On Sunday, the month’s full moon, dubbed the Hunter’s Moon, rises.
Related: How long is a day on Saturn?
LAST GLIMPSE
Angola’s prized athletes: The soccer stars play with crutches, gliding across the pitch on one foot. Wounded by remnants of war, they are bringing glory to their nation. Of the 15 players, 12 lost their limbs from landmines that remain—two decades after the end of Angola’s civil war. The team, including Manuel Rocha (pictured above), has achieved international success and won the last four Amputee Football World Cups.
