Blue skies and calm waters greet the team searching for the H.M.S Terror. The CCGS Sir Wilfrid Laurier sets out on its journey, carrying Parks Canada’s RV Investigator and the Canadian Hydrographic Service’s two launches, Gannet and Kinglett.

One of a pair of ships captained by a fabled British explorer that had been lost in the Arctic for more than 160 years has been found, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced earlier this week.

Using a remotely-operated underwater vehicle, a Canadian research team on Sunday found one of the ships that belonged to Sir John Franklin, the captain of a doomed 1845 voyage that took two ships and 129 men from Britain across the Atlantic in an attempt to navigate Canada's Northwest Passage.

“This is truly a historic moment for Canada," Harper said in a news release. "Franklin’s ships are an important part of Canadian history given that his expeditions, which took place nearly 200 years ago, laid the foundations of Canada’s Arctic sovereignty.

Sir John Franklin, circa 1830.

(Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

“Finding the first vessel will no doubt provide the momentum -- or wind in our sails -- necessary to locate its sister ship and find out even more about what happened to the Franklin Expedition’s crew," he added.

The Canadian government has spent years searching for the two vessels, the H.M.S. Erebus and the H.M.S. Terror, which were abandoned shortly after Franklin's expedition made it to the Canadian Arctic.

Exactly what happened to the crew is a mystery. Experts told the BBC that after the expedition ships became trapped in the ice near King William Island in Canada's Nunavut region, it's likely that many of the crew died from starvation in an attempt to find food. "Reports at the time from local Inuits say the men, desperate for food, resorted to cannibalism before they died," BBC.com reported.

Since 2008, Canada has mounted five searches to find the Franklin Expedition ships, surveying more than 745 square miles of the Arctic seabed in the process.

They've used everything from the Canadian Space Agency RADARSAT-2 satellite imagery to "high resolution multi-beam and side-scan sonar, Parks Canada’s remotely operated underwater vehicle and autonomous underwater vehicle, and DRDC’s state-of-the-art autonomous underwater vehicle, Arctic Explorer," Parks Canada said in a news release.

So what does this have to do with climate change, or a warming Earth? Without it, the expedition's successful discovery of Franklin's ship likely wouldn't have been possible. Until the past decade or so, the Northwest Passage has been too clogged with ice for ships to pass through.

The dramatic retreat of summertime Arctic sea ice has changed that in big ways, however, to the degree that cruise companies are scheduling luxury tours of the passage that will charge up to $20,000 per person for voyages that begin in 2016.

See the news release from the Canadian Prime Minister here, or see more photos from the discovery mission at Parks Canada.

MORE FROM WEATHER.COM: Searching For Sir John Franklin

Searching For Sir John Franklin

The H.M.S. Intrepid, trapped in pack ice in Baffin Bay, circa 1853. Captained by Sir Francis Leopold McClintock, the ship was on a mission to find the 1845 expedition of Sir John Franklin, which disappeared during a search for the Northwest Passage. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)