The Royal Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS) is presenting three-dimensional digital twins of two historic polar shipwrecks, Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova and Ernest Shackleton's Quest, at its Ottawa headquarters. The replicas were built by knitting together tens of thousands of seabed images captured during a summer 2026 expedition, and are meant to let the public examine the wrecks in close detail and to preserve them for posterity.
How the twins were made
The Heroic Age Expedition used photogrammetric technology from Voyis Imaging, a company based in Waterloo, Ontario, to capture detailed portraits of both ships. Imagery was gathered with the Falcon remotely operated vehicle of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), equipped with Voyis technology, and with the submersible Alvin. WHOI imaging specialist Zoë Daheron rendered the 3D models from the data gathered by the imaging system on Falcon.
Exhibition and public access
The digital twins are shown in the Heroic Age Exhibition, which opens at an evening celebrating Quest at 50 Sussex Drive in Ottawa on Wednesday, October 21. The exhibition also includes a film of the expedition and a gallery of still photographs, including underwater images of the wrecks. RCGS has said the replicas will later be made available to schools across the country.
RCGS leader John Geiger describes the experience of viewing the 3-D images as feeling "like you're basically swimming over the wrecks." The twins are intended to capture the ships as they are today, since both wrecks will eventually be subsumed into the seabed.
Release status
Canadian Geographic released the Terra Nova digital twin publicly online on October 16, 2026. The Quest twin was announced as having its own reveal still to come.
