An American research team has discovered the ship that carried Captain Robert Falcon Scott on his doomed expedition to the Antarctic.

The wreck of SS Terra Nova was found by researchers from the Schmidt Ocean Institute while they were mapping the ocean floor off Greenland.

Captain Scott and his party set off from Cardiff aboard the ship in 1910, hoping to become the first expedition to reach the South Pole.

The members of Capt. Scott's ill fated South Pole expedition pose at the pole in January 1912. (Cambridge University, HO/Associated Press)

But the 65-man expedition was beaten by a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundesen, whose party reached the South Pole five weeks before.

Captain Scott disembarked from the ship in Antarctica, planning to return after making his journey to the South Pole.

However disaster struck and Scott and half his team never made it back to the ship.

The Terra Nova, which was originally built as a whaling ship, was re-bought by its original owners and used for seal hunting.

It also supplied U.S. bases in World War II and eventually sank in September 1942.

Mystery object

While mapping the seabed, researchers noted there was a feature that they could not identify.

Upon further inspection, they discovered that the length of the object was 57 metres, which matched the reported length of the Terra Nova.

Marine researcher Leighton Rolley, who was onboard the research vessel, says the find is an "exciting" achievement.

He says researchers were able to lower a camera into the depths to confirm that the anomaly was indeed the sunken ship.

"The camera footage also identified the funnel of the vessel, next to the wreck," he said in a report for the Institute.

"The forecastle of the vessel appeared to be 'peeled' upwards to the port side and at an angle from the rest of the ship."

The team compared the funnel image with historical photographs of the SS Terra Nova.

"All observations jointly identified this wreck as the sunken [ship]."