Did you know that 23,000 shipping containers have been lost at sea since 2008? That's about 1,500 per year. In 2020 there was a huge spike to 4,000 containers, which prompted the World Shipping Council to start a safety campaign. In 2022 a mere 661 containers were lost:
The WSC would like you to know that the 2022 total amounts to only 0.00048% of the 250 million containers shipped that year—or possibly even less if you do the arithmetic correctly.¹ Also, the leading cause of lost containers is parametric rolling in following seas. And the WSC is committed to improving container safety.
I wonder what was in all those containers now bobbing around in the ocean?
¹My trusty Windows calculator returns 0.00026%.
I once had a knitting book I'd pre-ordered lost at sea. They had to re-print it and ship them again, and the author's fangirls were very disappointed.
Lots and lots of rubber duckies, from at least one of them-- a whole flotilla of rubber duckies.
Yep.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h7bHaKR403k&pp=ygUZcnViYmVyIGR1Y2tzIGxvc3QgYXQgc2VhIA%3D%3D
Garfield phones….
I don't think there are very many containers "bobbing around in the ocean". They're not completely watertight and will usually fill with water and sink within a few hours of hitting the ocean. The one that was full of rubber duckies was probably buoyant enough that it stayed afloat even filled with water in all the volume not occupied by the duckies until it broke open or was hit by another ship., but most cargo isn't that buoyant or watertight.
A modern day Q ship. From Asia, of course.
Just for the curious: The spike in 2013 was due to a single ship, the MOL Comfort. It sank with nearly 4,300 containers on board in the Indian Ocean.
Half of the 2020 losses were from a single ship, ONE APUS. The totals seem to be very sensitive to single ship disasters.
Thank you. That is exactly what I was wondering.
Parametric Rolling in Following Seas is going to be the name of my great American novel, after I write it.
Sounds like a Thomas Pynchon novel.
Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle has a scene where a ship was backed with bottles of mercury intentionally so parametric rolling would sink in big waters.
Correlates to number of major tropical storms?
Krikey, that's a lot of lost containers. There's got to be a whole salvage industry out there dedicated to finding these things (if they don't just sink right away) in hopes there might be something good in them. Kind of like those reality shows where people bid on the opportunity to open an abandoned storage unit.
Watch the movie "All is Lost" starring Robert Redford (2013)
wiki:
In the Indian Ocean ... [a] man wakes to find water flooding his boat. It has collided with a wayward shipping container, ripping a hole in the hull.
Kush. Those containers float especially high.....
OT, Kevin,the strip mall in Santa Ana is JUST NOT THAT INTERESTING....
Capiche?
Look up oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer (start with Wikipedia).
The rubber duckies were his work, and he realized that large assemblages of flotsam could illuminate pathways of ocean currents. He built a network of beachcombers to find this stuff. A big success was with a container of 10s of thousands of running shoes, which had the huge advantage of serial numbers so they could be definitively tracked to the container spill. A few months after being dumped into the North Pacific they showed up in BC, then WA and OR, then CA and years later in Hawaii.
Now long retired, he’s still called when something unusual shows up on a beach. One of the most ghoulish was a skeleton in a survival suit that ended up in Hawaii, which he traced to a fishing boat that sank off Alaska.
I was in a 110' , Assateague was her name, heading for Palmyra atoll on flag waving trip, then on to Kiribati. I had the deck and the navigation radar gave me a big fat square return where nothing should have been. It wasn't moving and it took a bit to see the container until we were closer (it was low in the water). Captain relieved me so I could ride the boat over to get ID numbers and see if it could be coaxed to the bottom. It had partially split open at a weld and was full of Styrofoam take away boxes. It wasn't going to sink. I noticed lots of flashes under the box, like electrical discharges. The shadow had lured many fish to it. We set the fish detail. The Island class cutters clutch in at revolutions for 8 knots, a design defect or maybe not - the top end was 30 knots. Anyway, four passes with maybe eight lines out and every hook got one on every pass. Mahi mahi, skipjack, albacore, yellowfin, maybe even bluefin. We ate well that night. And the next. And ...