Flying over Mongolia was similar. Go to sleep, wake up hours later and it’s still empty Mongolia down there.

Similar experience flying over Oz.

The outback is bloody enormous, red and monotonous. Those US mountains sound much more interesting.

I was in a pedalo on the river Exe with my girlfriend at the time & her brother.

He kept saying he was gonna drink some of the water straight from the river & eventually dunked his hands in & took a swig.

About 30 seconds later a semi-submerged used condom floated past. How we laughed.

Not really relevant to the OP, but all this talk of dangerous submerged objects reminded me of it.

This ship is obviously full of zombies

stay away

How does a ship just end up abandoned?

The original BBC article has the details.

edit: but if it were me, i’d probably go and have a look around…

See above.

I, for one, wouldn’t want to board that ship.

I’m not sure you’d need radar to track all the ships. Ships all know where they are, so all you’d need is a system where they all relay their position to a central authority and then a satellite to take mega high res pictures of the oceans and correlate the reported positions with the image. Any ship on the image that’s not reporting a position is either dead or pirates. Or maybe a whale.

So loads of satellites taking high res pictures of mostly empty ocean.

Sound. Who’s paying for that then?

And how long before a submarine owning nation knocks them all out the sky?

I’m not sure you’d need radar to track all the ships. Ships all know where they are, so all you’d need is a system where they all relay their position to a central authority.

Not so AIS is VHF based, so relativly short range and really intended for coastal approach and inter ship data.

SSAS (ship security Alert System) is satellite based, but only a relativly short time for its battery back up after power failure.

LRIT long range interrogation and tracking has the same battery back up limitation.

Also, just look at any piece of the horizon away from the Channel, then one of the tracking websites and all those ships out there are nowhere to be seen!

It’s almost as if the surface of the Earth is curved.

It’s almost as if the surface of the Earth is curved.

Surely all of the ghost ships should just float around to the bottom then and cluster there?

I was hoping we’d get a return of the Giant Cannibal Rats scare

all those ships out there are nowhere to be seen!

proper ghost ships then. You can see the one on the Cork coast – so its dead.  Not a ghost.

Someone’s gonna need a tug before they do anything. What a time to be alive.

What’s more amazing is the fact this ship stayed afloat for all that time, there have been much bigger ships than that one lost without any trace to show what happened to them. There are absolutely enormous waves out in mid-ocean that had been dismissed as sailors wild tales, and when evidence showed up they were thought to be one in a century, until close examination of satellite imagery of open ocean showed significant numbers of wave up to 30 meters trough to crest, which should be big enough to swamp a ship the size of this one if hit broadside.
Interesting bit of background in this article:

What’s more amazing is the fact this ship stayed afloat for all that time

Yes, it reminds me of a mate who bailed halfway down a tricky descent, only for his bike to correct itself and roll down to the bottom all by itself.

I’ve helped set up a tow line to bring a yacht into harbour that had engine failure and boarded a trawler at sea that had similar issues. Bloody scary work and that ship is a lot bigger.
Countzero. I remember the reports of rogue waves being confirmed as true by science bobbins around that time. Very comforting when living and working on a small ship! It is incredible it stayed afloat from just weather in general.

And they [containers] can last for years too, they’re watertight so youre waiting for them to either rust or the seals to perish which can be a very long time.

The seals aren’t the problem, they let water in almost immediately. The issue is that the container is, typically, filled with buoyant material (goods). The buoyancy of the goods inside the container, normally, isn’t enough to get the container to float above the surface, but it “floats” just below the surface.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-51558440

Some cool photos here, quite arty really!

Wouldn’t it be worth someone grabbing it for scrap value?

A chap I used to instruct flying runs an aircraft scrappage company.

He had a couple of Jumbos sat rotting once all the instruments and engines had gone. It would have cost more than their £50,000 scrap metal value to cut up, so it wasn’t worth it.

Those jumbos were on an (occasionally) dry airfield.

The costs of salvaging that Ship from wherever in the Atlantic would far outweigh the scrap value, so economics will dictate no one would bother with the effort.

Just hope there isn’t any oil leakage on the coast…

Someone’s gonna need a tug before they do anything.

I mean, whatever floats your boat…

SSAS (ship security Alert System) is satellite based, but only a relativly short time for its battery back up after power failure.

No I mean cross reference ship transmissions with satellite images – the ones in the pictures that aren’t transmitting are the dead ones.

No I mean cross reference ship transmissions with satellite images – the ones in the pictures that aren’t transmitting are the dead ones.

Who pays for all that?
To what end? (given the info above about it being too dangerous and not economically viable to “rescue” these ghost ships)

And realistically, there aren’t thousands of them to find. A few hundred at best, mostly small abandoned yachts, boats lost at sea or dragged out of harbours by freak storms or tsunamis.

Cleaning up the oceans is a laudable aim but start with the vast quantities of discarded fishing gear, plastic waste and oil spills.