. >> reporter: their mission to retrace the route of early 20th century explorer, douglas mossin whogo. >> a glorious day. exploring amidst the sea ice. we got up really close to this berg. >> reporter: five days into the trip. >> the expedition made it to the ice. >> reporter: the voyage was going according to plan. >> we struggled with sea ice. bashed through. headed south. 65 degrees. >> reporter: this ramshackle hut is left over from mossin's time. >> just cleared the entrance to mossin any hut. let's go in and take a look. the cold preserved the artifacts from a century age the goal of the expedition was to repeat mossin's experiments to measure how the climate changed over the past century. >> storage area. that's the kitchen stove. food preparation area. >> reporter: at first, they were blessed by unusually good weather in one of the windiest places on earth. they made it off the antarctica coast into commonwealth bay. on christmas eve, conditions turned ugly. >> hit by a terrible blizzard and lost our communications didn't we, nicole? >> sure did. >> reporter: the ship found