containers – Southern Fried Science

Happy Monday-est Monday!

Foghorn (A Call to Action!)

This is the final week to get you abstracts in for the International Marine Conservation Congress, the premier ocean conservation conference, coming to you from Kuching, Malaysia this June! We got a cracking good symposium on human impacts in the deep sea and plenty of travel grants available for researchers in need. And, for the first time, we’ll be hosting Make for the Planet, Borneo!

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

An outstanding piece on exploitation in the high seas by Jeff Marlow. The High Seas Are Being Exploited. Exploration Must Keep Pace.
This is a thing that happened:

The Claim: 10,000 containers are lost at sea every year.

Who said it: Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Slashdot, Yahoo News, NOAA, me, and many others.

Status: False.

10,000 is one of those numbers that’s big enough to be surprising, but not so huge to inspire immediate incredulity. The worldwide shipping industry is enormous and containers do get lost overboard. With a few recent high-profile maritime accidents, it’s not hard to believe that 10,000 containers could be sent to swim with the fishes every year.

The MOL Comfort breaks its back. Image via gCaptain.

Fortunately, it’s pretty hard to hide a missing container and the number of containers lost at sea is actually much lower than 10,000. In 2011 and 2014, the World Shipping Council surveyed it’s members to find out exactly how many containers are lost at sea each year. What they found was that not only was the number of lost containers an order of magnitude less than the 10,000 figure, but that the average was driven up by two catastrophic accidents–the sinking of the MOL Comfort and the grounding of the MV Rena.

Tag: containers

Meet me in Borneo, exploitation on the high seas, navy sonars, creature reports, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: March 12, 2018.

Busting Ocean Myths: How many containers are really lost at sea?