50 Times People Went To The Beach And Found Something They Least Expected (New Pics)

Since the planet is made up of 70% water, it’s inevitable for things to end up in the ocean. A 2020 study painted a picture, revealing an estimated 23 metric tons of plastic waste in waterways in 2016. 

These figures likely do not include the 28,000 rubber duckies that fell into the Pacific Ocean in 1992. The kiddie toys came from a freighter that capsized while traveling from China to America after being caught in a storm.

A similar incident occurred in 1997, when a cargo ship carrying five million LEGO bricks capsized off the southwest coast of England. The sea vessel was traveling from Rotterdam to New York and lost all 62 shipping containers. 

The incident, more infamously known as the Great LEGO Spill, is deemed the “single largest toy-related environmental disaster in history. Many experts claim that people continue to find LEGO pieces to this day.

Finding plastic toys in the ocean is one thing, but what if you stumble upon something so strange-looking that it causes panic in you? This is what happened in 2019, when a mysterious-looking orb washed up on the shores of East London. 

Police initially suspected it to be an unexploded bomb and called on inspectors to investigate. But upon closer look, it turned out to be a giant Christmas bauble.

Due to the large number of discarded items that fall into the ocean, many experts have used them to track currents. In 2023, Kagoshima University Professor Shigeru Fujieda stipulated that disposable cigarette lighters could be an excellent tracking tool. 

“Disposable lighters are one of the few types of marine litter that have evidence of their source, because they have printed information about the consuming country or city (e.g., point of sale address or telephone number),” Fujieda wrote in his paper published in the Regional Studies in Marine Science.

According to research ecologist Andrew DeVogelaere, discarded items that wash up ashore can be removed. The problem arises when items like hazardous medical waste, for example, sink to the bottom of the ocean and become trapped there. 

“We don’t even know the names of a lot of these things,” he told Popular Science. “We’re impacting a whole ecosystem that we don’t even understand.”