
The Cornish beaches where Lego keeps washing up - martokus
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28367198
======
colinramsay
This happened with MSC Napoli in 2007 - there were stories of people
scavenging motorbikes from containers!

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSC_Napoli](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSC_Napoli)

And earlier this year too - cigarettes this time:

[http://www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/news/fpfalmouth/11031368.Cor...](http://www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/news/fpfalmouth/11031368.Cornish_smokers_on_standby__14_tonnes_of_cigarettes_wash_up_on_Devon_coast/)

I'm lucky enough to live in Cornwall and I'd never heard of the lego thing,
very interesting!

~~~
BgSpnnrs
I remember the Napoli too, went and had a look out of curiosity. Also not
heard of this Lego incident! Of course shipwrecks, and even wreckers have an
illustrious history down here.

~~~
timthorn
I've visited Branscombe every year of my life - we've a family connection. It
used to be a fairly quiet but known seaside location, but ever since Napoli it
has been much busier. I assume it's all those people who went and had a look
and decided it was a pretty place to visit...

------
DanBC
> No-one knows exactly what happened next, or even what was in the other 61
> containers,

WHAT?

I imagined every container to have tracking and identification numbers so the
owners could know roughly where it is at all times; and so that various
government agencies could prevent import of things not allowed in their
countries. A quote a bit later on kind of supports that.

> She says the ship's manifest - a detailed list of everything in the
> containers - shows a whole range of Lego items, not all sea-themed. After
> all this time "it's the same old things that keep coming in with the tide",
> particularly after a bad storm.

I'm surprised about how many containers are lost.

> About 120m containers carried on world's oceans in 2013

> 2011 survey by World Shipping Council estimated an average of 675 containers
> lost at sea each year between 2008-10

> 2014 survey says average annual loss between 2011-13 was approximately 2,683
> containers

2,500 containers out of 120m is a small number, but still. How would you
design a pinger suitable for shipping containers so that they could be located
after being dropped overboard?

 __EDIT __I should have said that this pinger thing is just a thought
experiment. Obviously most containers are no lost, and most of the ones that
are are not toxic / valuable enough to bother with. (But thanks to the posters
below)

~~~
pjc50
_pinger suitable for shipping containers_

Locating things underwater is a tremendous pain because it's radio-opaque. So
you have to spend a lot of energy on sonar.

Having a power source for such a thing is a tremendous pain: you want a lot of
capacity and low self-discharge. Ideally the battery would be chemically or
mechanically inactive until underwater. Compare for example the wet cells in
the early radar anti-aircraft shells that were inert until fired out of a
cannon. Doable, but it's not going to be cheap.

Also, it's going to be expensive to fish up the container, and the contents
will generally be destroyed and worthless. Realistically this is only going to
be worth it for (a) things too toxic to leave lying around or (b) gold.

~~~
zenojevski
I think it should ping when it's dropping, before it sinks, kind of like a
Macbook does with mechanical hard drives.

Then sonaring it should be simpler, as we know the rough location.

------
jonah
_Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the
Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the
Author, Who Went in Search of Them_ [1] by Donovan Hohn is a great book about
a container of toys lost in the Pacific in 1992 and their subsequent travels
around the world.

Oceanographers have since learned about currents from tracing them.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby-
Duck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby-Duck)

~~~
ToastyMallows
Amazon link for the lazy:

[http://smile.amazon.com/Moby-Duck-Beachcombers-
Oceanographer...](http://smile.amazon.com/Moby-Duck-Beachcombers-
Oceanographers-Environmentalists-Including/dp/0143120506)

------
mdda
This was a surprisingly relevant story for me - I'm just decompressing after a
"Marine Hackathon" held over the weekend in Singapore [1]. It was an all-too-
brief glimpse into the vast container transshipment business, and the
operations of the enormous port here : The quantities of goods that flow
through the port is amazing [2]. i.e. more than 1 20 foot container per second
24/7/365.

[1] : [http://www.upsingapore.com/smart-port-
hackathon/](http://www.upsingapore.com/smart-port-hackathon/) [2] :
[http://www.seatrade-global.com/news/asia/singapore-port-
hand...](http://www.seatrade-global.com/news/asia/singapore-port-
handles-326m-teu-of-containers-in-2013.html)

------
sailfast
Was I the only one that thought it was appropriate to place a photo containing
a number of Lego life vests at the top of the article?

As a side note: Though a small fraction of the total transported, 675
containers a year floating around the ocean scares the bejesus out of me as an
offshore sailor. The fact that many are partially submerged and flow with
currents that are unpredictable makes the idea of crossing the channel quite
harrowing for anybody without a steel hull.

~~~
spiznnx
The containers are dangerous. You should watch the film "All is Lost", it's
about that exact scenario where it shipwrecks a solo sailing ship.

[http://imdb.com/title/tt2017038/](http://imdb.com/title/tt2017038/)

~~~
sailfast
Yup - saw that one in the theaters. Unfortunately for anyone that has sailed
before, Redford makes a bunch of incredibly stupid decisions-as-plot-devices.
Here's an article that helps put the problem in perspective:
[http://www.oceannavigator.com/March-
April-2013/A-legendary-o...](http://www.oceannavigator.com/March-
April-2013/A-legendary-offshore-danger/)

------
dasil003
side note: is the title correct grammar? As someone who grew up with "Legos"
plural and subsequently had the correct "Lego" plural beat into me by the
Internet, now this curveball.

Don't Lego "keep" washing up? Why would Lego "keeps" washing up? Is it an
amorphous blob like an oil spill? Seems to me more like fish.

~~~
gjm11
Usage seems to vary, but for me:

"Lego" (no preceding article) is a mass-noun for the stuff. It's not _really_
an amorphous blob, of course, but it's being thought of that way. Like "sand"
even though sand is made up of grains. "Sand keeps turning up in my shoes
after that trip to the beach." "Lego keeps washing up on the shore after that
container ship sank."

I call the individual bits "Lego pieces" or "Lego bricks" or "Lego blocks" or
whatever.

Some people call them "Legos", whose singular would be "a Lego" or something
of the kind. In that case it would be "Legos keep washing up".

I have never seen "Lego" used as an actual plural count-noun: "There are
thousands of Lego in that box". Either "thousands of Lego pieces" or
"thousands of Legos".

(I confess that using "Lego" as a count-noun makes my inner pedant twitch. But
language is defined by usage, and it may well be that by now it's correct.)

~~~
kbutler
It's likely a trademark issue. A trademark is suppose to be an adjective (a
Google search. A Lego brick.)

This is because a trademark identifies a specific source or producer of an
item. If a trademark is used as a noun (Kleenexes, Trampolines) it is a step
toward generic usage and loss of the trademark.

Hence, the Lego group would want you to talk about Lego bricks and Lego
pieces, but everyone else is fine talking about Legos. (Except my autocorrect,
which wants it to be Lego's)

------
francis88
It very much reminds me of Glass Beach, near Fort Bragg
California...[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_Beach_(Fort_Bragg,_Califo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_Beach_\(Fort_Bragg,_California\))

------
ed_blackburn
Kernow bys verkeyn!

(Sorry I couldn't resist it. I never thought I'd see a story on here about my
home.)

I've never heard to Lego story either, plenty of other things get washed up,
but I've never seen or heard of Lego.

------
logfromblammo
If you thought all the rocks, seashell fragments, and hot sand made walking
barefoot on the beach difficult before...

Certain ocean currents make some beaches more likely to accumulate interesting
detritus than others, including Asian tsunami debris, lost shipping, and the
occasional lonely shoe or boot with human foot remains still inside. That last
one happens more often than you might think.

------
josefresco
Reminds me of when I was a kid on the coast of Maine. Rowed out to a small
island and found scattered amongst the rocks over a large area hundreds of GI-
Joe parts. Mostly just parts/broken pieces, as if someone put an entire
collection inside a box and blew it up. Still to this day have no idea how or
why those were there.

------
oneweirdtrick
Reminds me of the Hansa Carrier incident:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansa_Carrier](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansa_Carrier)

The idea that a ton of lost sneakers helped to illustrate ocean currents blew
my mind as a kid.

------
Houshalter
I have seen plastic degrade significantly when left outside for just a year or
so. How long will Legos last floating in the ocean? At least in a usable or
recognizable form. Some of those pieces look pristine. And do animals eat
them?

~~~
kepano
It depends on the type of plastic. Legos are made of ABS which is one of the
most durable plastics, especially when it comes to outdoor conditions.

------
zabaki
More people should see this as an alternative way of providing a solution.

[http://vimeo.com/58461689](http://vimeo.com/58461689)

------
ck2
I thought lego was little rectangular bricks?

~~~
xerophtye
well yes, but they pieces aren't just bricks now. They have all sorts of
special shape pieces, not to mention the Lego character accessories like
flippers, swords, mugs etc etc.

~~~
swah
But they still would mostly have the "universal snapping mount"?[1] I also had
the feeling this wasn't legos, since that mount doens't appear.

(Ok, maybe not swords which go in minifigures hands.)

~~~
smorrow
Everything pictured on that page can be connected to something else in one way
or another. The lifejackets you put on by taking the dude's head off then on
again. The "dragons" are missing the top part of their heads.

