Garfield phones happen. Beware the garftide.
Cargo ships can lose anywhere from a single container to hundreds at a time in rough seas
D:
Much of the debris that washed up on Lewis’ beach matched items lost off the giant cargo ship ONE Apus in November 2020. When the ship hit heavy swells on a voyage from China to California, nearly 2,000 containers slid into the Pacific
Court documents and industry reports show the vessel was carrying…hazardous goods: batteries, ethanol and 54 containers of fireworks.
D:<
Ironically the hazardous (to people) goods may well be better for the ocean than most of the rest. Ethanol should disperse well enough and not cause much issue. Fireworks are mostly cardboard. Still a horror show though.
Fireworks are mostly cardboard.
Cardboard, and… black powder and various metals or salts as colorants.
They’re probably not a catastrophe, but they’re certainly not helping the environment.
What do you mean they don’t just have some tracker on them? What??
These aren’t tech companies, and they try to keep costs as low as possible
No, that’s not why.
I mean, it wouldn’t be cheap, but it would also be utterly nonsensical. So you put a tracker on a container and it sinks somewhere. Then what? First of all, this would have to be a satellite device (costly per container, then consider that thousands that fit onto a single ship), which needs sensors to detect it’s going overboard and then send out its position before it’s submerged. Maybe something communicating with the ship instead of satellites would be a little cheaper, but it’s equally pointless, because the container wouldn’t sink in a straight line and burst open long before it reaches the bottom.
Average ocean depth is 3,682 meters (12,080 feet). Nobody will go on a costly underwater expedition using one of the maybe ten or twenty civilian submarines on the entire planet (each worth tens of millions) that can handle this kind of depth without imploding to recover some soggy Chinese fast fashion garbage or crushed iPhones (because the pressure down there is about 366 times as much as at sea level - I don’t think Apple rates their devices for that). Even if you do, you’d need a lot of trips picking up future landfill fodder with a little robot arm to get even close to getting all of the up to around 25 tons of former cargo.
