VIDEO: Lego Captain Washes Ashore Along With 5 million Other Pieces

A container filled with millions of Lego pieces fell into the sea off Cornwall in 1997. But instead of remaining at the bottom of the ocean, they are still washing up on Cornish beaches today - offering an insight into the mysterious world of oceans and tides. (BBC News Magazine)

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In 1997, a shipping container carrying 4.8 million Lego pieces fell into the sea. Today, pieces from the container are still washing loads of Lego pieces onto the beaches near Cornwall, UK. BBC News reports that the container accident was a “once in a 100-year phenomenon, tilting the ship 60 degrees one way, then 40 degrees back”. 

It is ironic that the shipment that was lost contained many Legos from the Aquazone Line, a nautically themed set. This set included flippers, harpoons, scuba gear, and much more. You can see a full documentation by Tracey Williams’s Facebook page called “Lego Lost at Sea“.

The Huffington Post cites a couple an important insight from US oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer.

The most profound lesson I’ve learned from the Lego story is that things that go to the bottom of the sea don’t always stay there. Tracking currents is like tracking ghosts – you can’t see them. You can only see where flotsam started and where it ended up.”

The full container that was lost included the following pieces:

Toy kits – Divers, Aquazone, Aquanauts, Police, FrightKnights, WildWest, RoboForce TimeCruisers, Outback, Pirates

Spear guns (red and yellow) – 13,000 items

Black octopus – 4,200

Black Octopus Lego piece (Tracey Williams)

Yellow life preserver – 26,600

Diver flippers (in pairs: black, blue, red) – 418,000

Dragons (black and green) – 33,941

Brown ship rigging net – 26,400

Daisy flowers (in fours – white, red, yellow) – 353,264

Scuba and breathing apparatus (grey) – 97,500

Total of 4,756,940 Lego pieces lost overboard in a single container

Estimated 3,178,807 may be light enough to have floated

Sea Grass (Tracey Williams)

With the possibility that these pieces could have floated all the way around the world in the past 17 years and most likely will continue to float around in our ocean waters, we can only imagine the devastating effect that this has had on marine life local to the Cornwall area and surrounding areas that have seen a high volume of Legos.

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