Browsing: ocean

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.

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On the morning of July 27, 1866, the SS Great Eastern dropped anchor in Heart’s Content, Newfoundland, with 1,686 nautical…

In 1992, a container ship leaving Hong Kong lost 28,800 plastic bath toys overboard in the North Pacific, and oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer spent the next two decades tracking yellow ducks and blue turtles as they washed up in Alaska, Maine, and eventually the coast of Scotland, quietly rewriting the textbook map of ocean currents.

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On January 10, 1992, a container ship hit a violent storm somewhere near the International Date Line on its way…