As the Hunter and the Kaiko Maru negotiated the floes, they smashed into each other.
Forced to abandon ship, Shackleton and his crew were set adrift on the floes.
The strait is the exit route from the Arctic Ocean, a current carrying the floes south into the Atlantic.
For six months the trapped ship drifted over 1, 000 miles with the floes.
These Adelies dive up to 400 feet, dodging giant ice floes the size of cars which bash around in the surf.
The stunning landscape is filled with frozen glaciers, icebergs and ice floes.
Back on terra firma after 497 days adrift, the ragged crew found their new environment as brutally inhospitable as the drifting floes.
Nonetheless, computer modelling suggests a warming of the climate around Antarctica could result in the loss of more northern ice floes later this century.
At a moment when nationalistic claims and counter-claims are resounding over the ice-floes, the region's intractability still forces its would-be conquerors to rub along.
When I sailed through the passage on a Canadian icebreaker, the Amundsen, in October that year, we encountered huge floes of thick ice.
It was 70 years ago, in 1937, that Ivan Papanin first landed on drifting ice floes and raised the Soviet flag over the North Pole-1 station.
But the sparse mostly Inuit populations dotted along the coastline find that ice floes are often so thin that hunters can no longer use dog sledges, reports say.
When eventually the floes began to break up in April 1916, Shackleton loaded his men into three small lifeboats and struck out for Elephant Island, an uninhabited speck of land some 100 miles distant.
And given that the krill (tiny crustaceans) that penguins feed on are also dependent on the ice for their own existence (they feed on algae on the ice) - some colonies affected by eroded floes could face a double-whammy of high fledgling mortality and restricted food resources.
Satellites have long been used to track ice extent (area), but calculating the thickness of the marine floes requires the overflying spacecraft to gauge the difference between the top of the ice surface and the top of the water - a relatively simple calculation then gives the overall volume.
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