Why the Drake Passage is becoming MORE Deadly

[00:00:00]In November 2022, a modern expedition cruise ship was sailing back from Antarctica. It had all the things you'd expect from a ship built for this part of the world. Modern navigation, an experienced crew, a nice strengthened hull, and all the safety systems needed to take tourists into one of the harshest oceans on Earth. But this crossing was different. The day before, a passenger had been injured in a Zodiac accident in Antarctica. So the ship had to cut its trip short and was heading back to Eshwire for a medical evacuation. Then in the Drake Passage, one wave hit the side of the ship. Seven cabin windows shattered. Eight people were injured and one passenger was sadly killed. When investigators looked into what happened, the most worrying detail wasn't that an old ship had been caught in an ancient danger. It was that a modern Antarctic cruise ship had been hit by a wave. Its windows were not fully designed to withstand. The windows met the rules, but the problem was the rules themselves. They had not properly accounted for the pressure of a breaking wave hitting the side of a ship. And that's what makes this so unsettling because the Drake Passage is already one of the most feared stretches of ocean on Earth. Historic estimates link hundreds of shipwrecks and thousands of deaths to the waters around Cape Horn and the Drake Passage. It sits in the path of the strongest ocean current on the planet. It can produce waves the height of buildings. And now scientists are warning that the ocean around it is changing. The strongest winds are getting stronger. The biggest waves are getting bigger and more people are crossing the Drake Passage than at any point in modern history. So the question is no longer why is the Drake Passage so dangerous. The question now is why is it getting more dangerous?

[00:01:57]To understand why the Drake Passage is getting more dangerous, we first need to understand where it is and what actually causes it. It sits between Cape Horn at the very bottom of South America and the South Shetland Islands just above Antarctica. At its narrowest point, it's roughly 600 m wide, which is about 1,000 km. That sounds enormous, and to be fair, it's about the distance from London to the south of France. But in ocean terms, it's a squeeze point. The Atlantic, Pacific, and Southern oceans are all connected through the same gap.

[00:02:33]And moving through that gap is the Antarctic circumpolar currents, also known as the ACC, the most powerful ocean current on Earth. The current flows around Antarctica from west to east. And unlike most major currents, it doesn't crash into a continent and stop.

[00:02:51]It circles the entire planet again and again with almost nothing in its way.

[00:02:58]It's driven by fierce westerly winds and carries more water than every river on Earth combined. And when that current reaches the Drake Passage, it has to pass through the gap between Antarctica and South America. It's forced through the gap like a funnel and the winds arrive with almost no land to slow them down. That's why sailors gave latitude names which sound more like threats than places. The roaring 40s, the furious 50s, and the screaming 60s. And the seafloor underneath the Drake Passage is uneven and complicated. There are ridges, trenches, and sudden depth changes. Places where the ocean drops thousands of meters below the surface.

[00:03:39]As a current moves across that underwater landscape, it gets disturbed.

[00:03:44]A bit like fast water hitting rocks in a river, but on a scale almost impossible to imagine. That's why long before engines, satellites, or modern weather forecast systems, this stretch of ocean had already become a ship graveyard.

[00:04:04]Historic estimates often claim that around 800 ships were lost in the waters around Cape Horn in the Drake Passage.

[00:04:10]Thousands of sailors died trying to reach this part of the world. The Cape Monument pays tribute to all the sailors who never made it home. But the numbers only take you so far. The individual stories are much worse. In 1578, Sir Francis Drake didn't set out to discover the passage that now carries his name.

[00:04:32]He was trying to say through the straight of Mellin when a storm scattered his fleet and drove one of his ships far south. At the time, some Europeans still believed that South America might be connected to a huge southern continent. Drake's disaster helped prove that there was open ocean below South America. So, the Drake Passage entered European history almost by accident. In 1741, HMS Wager was part of a British naval squadron trying to round Cape Horn. The ships were battered by storms and they were separated. The men were cold, sick, and exhausted.

[00:05:10]Then, the wager wrecked on a remote island off the coast of what is now Chile. The survivors were stranded in one of the most isolated places on Earth. The crew split into factions.

[00:05:22]There was a mutiny and accusations of murder. Men tried to escape in small boats made from the wreckage. Some died at sea. Some were abandoned. A few eventually reached Brazil, starving and almost unrecognizable. The ocean didn't kill them all in one dramatic moment. It wrecked the ship first and then let the cold, hunger, and isolation do the rest.

[00:05:47]But perhaps the most haunting story is the Sant Telmo. In 1819, the Spanish warship Santelmo was sailing towards Peru with 644 men on board. It was damaged in severe weather near the Drake Passage. And then it vanished. No rescue, no survivors, and no final message. Just a warship carrying hundreds of men disappearing into the Southern Ocean. Later, wreckage was reportedly found near the South Shetland Islands. But that raises a really disturbing possibility. If any of the crew reached land alive, they may have been amongst the first ever humans to step foot on Antarctica, but nobody will ever know because nobody came back.

[00:06:32]Ships don't just sink in the Drake Passage. They can disappear. And for centuries, there was a real chance that if you vanished in the Great Passage, nobody would ever know what happened.

[00:06:44]That was until Sir Ernest Shackleton.

[00:06:50]In December 1914, Ernest Shackleton and 27 men set sail on the Endurance. Their goal was to complete the first land crossing of Antarctica, but they never even reached the starting point. In January 1915, the ship became trapped in a pack of ice in the Wed Sea. At first, the ice held the ship and then it started to crush it. For months, the crew watched the pressure build, wood twisted, beams cracked, and the ship groaned under the weight of the ice. And on November the 21st, 1915, the Endurance sank. The crew were now stranded on the ice with no ship, no way to call for help, and no guarantee the ice beneath them would hold. They survived on seal and penguin meets, and they dragged lifeboats across the ice.

[00:07:42]They waited as the frozen surface underneath them slowly broke apart.

[00:07:47]Eventually, they launched the boats and made a 5-day journey to Elephant Island.

[00:07:52]And I know that sounds like progress, but Elephant Island is still brutally isolated. Nobody lived there and nobody was coming to save them. The world quite literally had no idea where they were.

[00:08:06]So Shackleton took five men and climbed into this 22 ft wooden lifeboat called the James Kurd. 22 ft is tiny for what they were about to do. They were going to use it to attempt to cross roughly 800 miles of the Southern Ocean. For 16 days they were soaked, frozen, and thrown around by waves. They navigated by the sun and stars when they could see them. And when they couldn't, they had to guess. Somehow, remarkably, the James Kurd survived. Shackleton reached South Georgia, crossed its mountains on foot, found help, and came back for his men.

[00:08:45]Not one single member of the Endurance crew died. It's one of the greatest survival stories ever recorded, but it also shows you how weird this stretch of ocean can be. Six men in a wooden lifeboat survived, but a Spanish warship with 644 men vanished. That is the Drake Passage. There is no simple rule of who makes it and who doesn't.

[00:09:14]The obvious argument here is that all of this belongs in the past. wooden ships, no engines, no radar, no satellites, and no modern weather forecast systems. But as I mentioned in the intro with the Viking Polaris in 2022, that's not the case. And it's also not the only case in recent history. In 2007, the MS Explorer was sailing near the South Shetland Islands. This was not an old sailing ship. It was an Antarctic expedition cruise ship built for exactly this kind of environment. Then it struck ice. The damage was tiny, a hole around 10 in by 4 in, roughly the size of a letter box.

[00:09:54]But in Antarctic water, that was enough.

[00:09:57]Water flooded into the lower decks.

[00:10:00]Passengers woke up to seaater in their cabins. More than 150 people were evacuated into lifeboats and rafts in the dark in freezing conditions and waited over 3 hours for rescue. Everyone survived, but the ship sank later that day. And just 2 hours after the last person was rescued, Gale Force winds hit the area. So 2 hours was the margin of when the survival rate would have started to drop. Then in 2010, the Clealia 2 was returning through the Drake Passage when a large wave smashed a bridge window. Water damaged communications and radar equipment, and engine performance was reduced. The ship didn't sink and it didn't lose steering, but this footage shows just how violent the seas were that they were navigating.

[00:10:48]The captain later said he had crossed the Drake more than 150 times and had never seen conditions like it. Modern ships are stronger, forecasts are better, and rescues are faster. But the Drake Passage can still turn one small thing into a serious emergency. So, now it's time to answer the question, why is the Drake Passage getting more dangerous?

[00:11:15]In 2019, researchers published one of the largest studies ever done on ocean winds and waves. They analyzed satellite measurements from 1985 to 2018 and around 4 billion observations. They then checked the data against more than 80 ocean boys. And one of the clearest warning signs was in the Southern Ocean.

[00:11:37]The extreme winds, the top end of wind speeds, had increased by about 1.5 m per second. That's around 8%. The extreme waves had increased by about 30 cm.

[00:11:49]That's about 5%. Now, I know 30 cm doesn't sound like much. It's basically the length of a school ruler. But these aren't waves on a beach. These are the biggest waves in one of the roughest oceans on Earth. getting even higher.

[00:12:03]The Drake Passage isn't dangerous because of the average day. It's dangerous because of the worst moments, the strongest gusts, the biggest waves, the moment where everything lines up badly. Essentially, the most extreme version of it is becoming more extreme and future projections point in the same direction. Under high emission scenarios, researchers projected that extreme wave events could become up to 10% larger and more frequent across major ocean regions by the end of this century. And once again, the Southern Ocean is expected to see some of the largest increases. But that alone isn't the full answer because at the same time, more people are crossing the Drake Passage than ever before. For most of history, the Drake Passage was crossed by people who had no choice. Today, it's increasingly crossed by tourists.

[00:12:55]Antarctica has become a bucket list destination. And for most people, traveling by ship to the Antarctic Peninsula, the Drake Passage is part of that journey. It's no longer just an obstacle at the end of the world. It's part of the experience. People film it from the deck. They post it online. Even the Drake shake has become a known phrase, otherwise known as the Drake Lake if it's a karma day. But behind that is a simple numbers problem. In the 2013 to 2014 Antarctic season, the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators recorded roughly 37,000 seaborn passengers when you combine landing passengers and cruise only passengers. By 2023 to 2024, that number was over 122,000.

[00:13:44]In just 10 years, it had more than tripled. And obviously that doesn't mean that there's guaranteed to be more fatal accidents. But simply more ships means more crossings. More crossings means more exposure. More exposure means more chances for one bad weather window. One piece of ice. One mechanical problem.

[00:14:06]One breaking wave. One moment where the Drake does what it always has done. But now with more people in its path, the worst conditions are becoming more powerful and more people are putting themselves in front of them. If you enjoyed this video and you have time for another, click this playlist with all of my best videos or watch this video that YouTube thinks you might