lego cruise ship sinking

After 25 Years at Sea, Shipwrecked Lego Pieces Are Still Washing Ashore on Beaches in England

In 1997, a cargo ship was struck by a rogue wave. Among 62 shipping containers aboard, one contained five million plastic toy bricks

Elizabeth Gamillo

Daily Correspondent

Along the beaches of Cornwall, England's southwestern peninsula, locals and tourists alike have been finding more than just seashells along the seashore. Colorful ocean-themed Legos of octopuses with twisting tentacles, miscellaneous scuba gear, boxy whales, and other plastic pieces have been washing ashore for the last 25 years—a grim reminder of the lasting impacts of plastic pollution.

On February 13, 1997, about five million Legos were lost at sea when a  rogue wave  tipped a massive cargo ship dubbed the Tokio Express. Ironically, many of the kits were sea creature themed. The event, known as the Great Lego Spill, is the worst toy-related environmental disaster of all time, and beachcombers still uncover the shipwrecked plastic treasures today, reports Mindy Weisberger for  Live Science .

The Lego pieces aboard the Tokio Express were among 62 shipping containers that tumbled off the vessel. The ship was en route to New York after it loaded its cargo in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, when an unpredictable 28-foot wave smashed into a cargo ship 20 miles off the mainland, reports Jackie Butler for  Cornwall Live . Other items swept to sea included 10,000 disposable lighters, superglue, and other hazardous chemicals. 

Ever since, collectors have gone out to look for "rare" pieces like octopuses and green dragons. Tracey Williams—a Cornwall local, beachcomber, and environmental campaigner—has documented the Lego spill for years on "Lego Lost at Sea" social media pages via  Facebook,   Instagram , and  Twitter . More recently, she published  Adrift :  The Curious Tale of Lego Lost at Sea , a book detailing the Lego incident.

Though the wayward novelties may inspire wonder, the tiny bricks highlight plastic pollution's impact on oceans. Out of the 4,756,940 Lego pieces on board, about 3,178,807 were light enough to float and are what is commonly found across 40 beaches in Cornwall, eported Mario Cacciottolo for the BBC in 2014. For example, small plastic flowers and mini diver's flippers are regularly seen along the shores.

"What we're finding now are the pieces that sank as well as the pieces that floated," Williams tells  Live Science . "It's providing us with an insight into what happens to plastic in the ocean, how far it drifts — both on the surface of the ocean but also along the seabed — and what happens to it as it breaks down." 

In 2017, Rob Arnold, a local of Cornwall, and 12 other volunteers collected about six million pieces of microplastics from a beach near his home, reported  Inverse's   Nick Lucchesi at the time. The volunteers found plenty of Lego bits among other plastic pieces, including 240 Lego divers' flippers, on beaches two decades after the cargo ship tipped. 

Plastic can take centuries to degrade in the ocean, and as it deteriorates, it releases chemicals that can disrupt the reproductive systems of animals,  Live Science  reports. Future generations will likely continue to experience the aftermath of the Great Lego Spill. A study published in  Environmental Pollution  in 2020 found that after analyzing the structure of Legos with X-ray fluorescence, it would take about 1,300 years for the 1997 castaway Legos to degrade fully.

According to the  IUCN , at least 14 million tons of plastic end up in the oceans every year and make up 80 percent of all marine debris found in deep-sea sediments and drifting on surface waters.

Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Elizabeth Gamillo | | READ MORE

Elizabeth Gamillo is a daily correspondent for  Smithsonian and a science journalist based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She has written for Science magazine as their 2018 AAAS Diverse Voices in Science Journalism Intern.

5 million shipwrecked Legos still washing up 25 years after falling overboard

The ship Tokio Express spilled its Lego cargo after colliding with a rogue wave.

A once-in-a-century wave that pummeled a cargo ship in 1997 caused the worst toy-related environmental disaster of all time. As the vessel Tokio Express pitched and rolled near the United Kingdom's southwestern coast, 62 shipping containers tumbled off the ship — and one of them dumped nearly 5 million plastic Lego pieces into the ocean.

Soon after the event, which some referred to as the Great Lego Spill, beachgoers in Cornwall, U.K., began finding brightly-colored plastic Legos. Even now, 25 years after the Feb. 13 disaster, numerous Legos from the spill still appear on beaches in Cornwall.

Coincidentally, many of those sea-tossed Lego pieces were nautically-themed. There were tens of thousands of octopuses, life jackets, scuba tanks, diving fins and pirate cutlasses, along with terrestrial shapes such as flowers, "witches' brooms" and dragons, said British beachcomber and writer Tracey Williams, author of " Adrift: The Curious Tale of the Lego Lost at Sea " (Unicorn Publishing Group, 2022).

Related: How much plastic actually gets recycled?  

Williams began collecting beach Legos in 1997 in South Devon, U.K., soon after the spill; more than a decade later, she launched the Lego Lost at Sea Facebook group , where people shared photos of the Legos that they found on British beaches, Williams told Live Science.

"In 2010, I moved to Cornwall to be close to my family, and on my first trip to the beach I noticed Legos from the spill again," Williams said. "I was amazed that it was still washing up after all that time."

On that fateful day in 1997, the Lego bricks and objects had been loaded onto the Tokio Express in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and they were bound for New York. But disaster struck about 20 miles (32 kilometers) off the coast of western Cornwall, in the form of a rogue wave, Cornwall Live reported in 2014.

Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now

Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.

For centuries, rogue waves — immensely tall and dangerous ocean waves that seemingly appeared out of nowhere — were thought to exist only in maritime legends. However, evidence in recent decades has shown that these waves do exist, though their unpredictability makes them difficult to track and study, according to the National Ocean Service (NOS). Also known as extreme storm waves, rogue waves are thought to form out of merging swells; the resulting wall of water can measure dozens of feet high and may rise suddenly and unexpectedly from a direction other than that of visible surface waves, the NOS says.

The captain of the Tokio Express described the Feb. 13 rogue wave as a "once in a 100-year phenomenon" that first rocked the ship 60 degrees in one direction and then 40 degrees in the opposite direction, according to the BBC . The ship's manifest listed 4,756,940 Lego pieces that were lost at sea, of which 3,178,807 were light enough to float, Cornwall Live reported. In 2015, the BBC mapped more than 40 beach locations in Cornwall where people had reported collecting wayward Lego bits. Williams and her family have probably collected thousands of Legos since the time of the spill, she told Live Science.

Beachcombers initially found the lighter-weight pieces, such as slippers, flowers, lifejackets and octopuses. Black and green dragons, which were also a common sight on beaches but were slightly heavier by comparison, may have also floated because they contained air pockets, Williams said.

— Plastic bag waste litters landscape (Infographic)

— In images: The great Pacific garbage patch

— Plastic legacy: Humankind's trash is now a new rock  

"What we're finding now are the pieces that sank as well as the pieces that floated," she said. "It's providing us with an insight into what happens to plastic in the ocean, how far it drifts — both on the surface of the ocean but also along the seabed — and what happens to it as it breaks down." But one of the big problems with plastic pollution is that it can take centuries to degrade in the ocean, and as it deteriorates it releases chemicals that can harm animals' hormones and disrupt their reproduction, according to the American Chemical Society .

In fact, it may be even longer than a few hundred years until the lost Lego pieces break down. When scientists recently analyzed the structure of weathered beach Legos using   X-ray fluorescence, they found that it could take up to 1,300 years for Legos from the 1997 spill to degrade entirely, researchers reported in July 2020 in the journal Environmental Pollution .

Originally published on Live Science.

Mindy Weisberger is an editor at Scholastic and a former Live Science channel editor and senior writer. She has reported on general science, covering climate change, paleontology, biology, and space. Mindy studied film at Columbia University; prior to Live Science she produced, wrote and directed media for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Her videos about dinosaurs, astrophysics, biodiversity and evolution appear in museums and science centers worldwide, earning awards such as the CINE Golden Eagle and the Communicator Award of Excellence. Her writing has also appeared in Scientific American, The Washington Post and How It Works Magazine.

Traces of hallucinogenic plants and chile peppers found at Maya ball court suggest rituals took place there

PTSD tied to 95 'risk hotspots' in the genome

New UTI vaccine wards off infection for years, early studies suggest

Most Popular

• 2 Claude 3 Opus has stunned AI researchers with its intellect and 'self-awareness' — does this mean it can think for itself?
• 3 Giant, 82-foot lizard fish discovered on UK beach could be largest marine reptile ever found
• 4 Global 'time signals' subtly shifted as the total solar eclipse reshaped Earth's upper atmosphere, new data shows
• 5 Scientists discover once-in-a-billion-year event — 2 lifeforms merging to create a new cell part
• 2 China green-lights mass production of autonomous flying taxis — with commercial flights set for 2025
• 3 George Washington's stash of centuries-old cherries found hidden under Mount Vernon floor
• 4 5 catastrophic megathrust earthquakes led to the demise of the pre-Aztec city of Teotihuacan, new study suggests
• 5 Scientists find one of the oldest stars in the universe in a galaxy right next to ours

Lego Lost At Sea: How a search for five million figurines lost off the coast of Cornwall in 1997 uncovered an underwater world of plastic toys

Beachcomber Tracey Williams, from Cornwall, has been documenting her finds for years through her Lego Lost At Sea social media accounts. In a new book, Adrift, she tells the story of how a cargo spill of the toys in 1997 opened her eyes to the problem of plastic in our oceans.

Culture and entertainment reporter @gemmapeplow

Monday 7 February 2022 10:01, UK

When almost five million pieces of Lego escaped into the sea off the coast of Cornwall, spilled from a cargo ship hit by a freak storm, the tiny, colourful figurines that soon amassed on the beaches quickly became a treasure trove for beachcombers.

Many of the pieces, coincidentally, were sea-themed: flippers, octopuses, life jackets, spear guns, cutlasses, sharks and scuba tanks; thousands of them making their way to the shoreline to be found bobbing in rockpools and strewn across the sand. There were also witches hats, wands, brooms and more.

The Tokio Express was a cargo ship bound for New York in the US after setting sail from Rotterdam in the Netherlands. It was 13 February 1997 when it all but overturned about 20 miles off Land's End, the container of Lego one of just 62 that fell into the water. Twenty-five years later, its tiny plastic passengers can still often be found washed up on the shore, many barely unchanged by the passage of time and a life under the waves.

Tracey Williams was living in Devon when the shipping crate spilled, and this is where she first started noticing the Lego. The toys had captured the imaginations of residents for miles around; like the Panini football sticker albums that were playground staples of the 1970s, '80s and '90s, they became collectibles - with the rare green dragons (the container had held just 514, compared with 33,427 black dragons) among the biggest prizes. Black octopuses were the "holy grail" as they blended in with the seaweed so were difficult to spot; Williams found her first in 1997 but didn't discover another for 18 years.

After moving inland, she forgot about the Lego for a while. But after returning to Cornwall in 2010, she discovered Lego items during her very first trip to the beach there. What started as a collecting exercise turned into an exploration of our oceans, the rubbish that ends up in the water, and the lingering legacy of plastic.

"I thought it was amazing that it was still washing up all these years later," she says. "It started off as a bit of fun. But over the years, it made me realise the amount of plastic in the ocean and buried in the sand."

Williams started to record her findings, at first setting up a Facebook page and later other social media accounts on Twitter and Instagram. Thousands of people got in touch, she says, sharing details of their own beachcombing treasures.

She now tells the story in a new book, Adrift: The Curious Tale Of The Lego Lost At Sea. "It was interesting to start mapping it and see how far it had travelled," she says. Lego pieces were found on the Gower peninsula in Wales, County Kerry in Ireland, Kent and Guernsey. Some made their way to France and Belgium, some even returned to Holland.

"It was thought at the time that half the Lego floated and half sank - that's a bit simplified, but pretty much," says Williams. "What we're realising is that even the Lego that sank is now starting to wash ashore and it's gradually drifting along the seabed. I think it shows us how long plastic lasts and how far it travels and what happens to it as it breaks down."

Tim Brooks, vice-president of environmental sustainability at the Lego Group, is interviewed in the book, and tells Sky News the company is "passionate about keeping Lego bricks out of nature, and we don't ever want Lego bricks to end up in the sea". He adds: "The Lego Group is very serious about taking care of the planet and we have a bold sustainability strategy that aims to leave a positive impact on the planet for children to inherit."

You will find Williams, accompanied by her dog Jess, combing the beach near her home on the north coast of Cornwall first thing each morning. At the moment, following a seaweed invasion that brought lots of rubbish with it, this can be the first of up to four trips a day, she says, although points out that there is not always such a need.

"I've picked up about 2,000 strips of rubber, which we think might be from lobster pots or crab pots, but I don't know. Things like dental floss and diabetes lancets, it's all stuff that I guess has been flushed down the loo in years gone by and it's still all down there. Some of it is 40 years old."

During her beach cleans, Williams has uncovered all sorts of items: pens, toothbrushes, coat-hangers and of course, plastic bottles. She amassed a colourful collection of lids from Smartie tubes that are "50 to 60 years old". Unsurprisingly, much of the rubbish now is COVID-related.

She has thousands of Lego items stored away at home, with plans for an exhibition one day, but doesn't keep much else. "I try and find a home for it," she says of the rest of the rubbish she finds. "I pass a lot of the plastics on to local artists who use it to raise awareness of marine debris. We recycle what we can. Buckets and spades, good quality items, we'll take to charity shops and so on."

Adrift is filled with beautiful images of Williams' finds which evoke feelings of nostalgia; the long-forgotten childhood toys that have lived on in a different world. She hopes it will raise awareness of the damaging effects of plastic in our oceans in a way that doesn't make people feel afraid or like they are being blamed.

"I think what the Lego has done, it's allowed us to sort of tell the story of plastic in the ocean in a way that's not too frightening and in a way that people can identify with. I do have some horrible images, upsetting images, of birds strangled in rope and I think sometimes it can be so upsetting that you don't want to look at it. I get that. It is an upsetting subject, but what I've tried to do is tell the story of ocean plastic in a way that is not so upsetting."

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, she says. "Are toothbrushes beautiful?" One toothbrush is rubbish, perhaps, but when you see dozens lined up together it makes for a piece of thought-provoking art. Some photos show typical rubbish - crisp packets, bottles, fishing lures and tattered flip-flops - while others feature the symbols of many childhoods: cereal packet toys, a Garfield phone, My Little Ponies, as well as the Lego.

Growing up in the '90s, I collected Trolls while my sister had Polly Pockets, I tell Williams. These too have been found washed up in Cornwall.

"I don't know what happened to all my childhood toys," Williams says. "Do you know what happened to yours? It makes you suddenly think, 'well, where are they?' Are they in landfill somewhere? Is the landfill going into the sea? It makes you think, 'I had all these things, but where did they all end up?'"

The Garfield phone wasn't a find in Cornwall, but rather in Brittany, on the northwest coast of France. Williams documents other cargo spills in Adrift - including the famous 1992 rubber duck escape in the North Pacific - and tells how the Garfield phone featured wasn't a one-off; the devices mysteriously started washing up on beaches in Brittany in the 1980s, she says. The source? A lost shipping container of the phones which was eventually found lodged in a sea cave.

The brick on the left was in the box of samples supplied by Lego back in 1997. The one on the right has been lying at the bottom of the sea for 25 years. There were 4,200 of these on board the Tokio Express. #oceanplastic pic.twitter.com/HCciTygaTR — Lego Lost At Sea (@LegoLostAtSea) January 31, 2022

As part of her research, Williams teamed up with scientists at the University of Plymouth to test how long Lego could last in the sea. Between 100 and 1,300 years, they concluded. She recently shared two side-by-side photos of Lego bricks on social media, one a sample provided in 1997, the other discovered in a fisherman's net at the end of January.

"There's not much difference between them," she says. "[The brick from the spill] has got a few marine creatures living on it but it's still in perfect condition.

"I think what's shocking me now is realising how much [plastic] is actually lying on the seabed because I think very often you only really see and hear about the plastic that washes ashore. If there's a cargo spill, there's usually reports of what's washing up but there's never any mention of all the items that sank to the bottom of the sea.

"I think it's assumed that it's almost gone forever and lost without trace. But we know from the Lego that it's all still there."

Adrift: The Curious Tale Of The Lego Lost At Sea, by Tracey Williams, is out now

Related Topics

• climate change

Lego lost at sea exhibition at Royal Cornwall Museum

• Published 15 July 2023

Pieces of Lego are hauled up every week by fishermen off Cornwall, more than 25 years after a huge cargo ship spill.

More than five million Lego pieces were lost from the Tokio Express off Land's End in 1997, when a freak wave knocked 62 containers into the sea.

Pieces have been washing up along Cornish beaches ever since, and have been found as far away as the Channel Islands, Ireland, Holland and Denmark.

The tale is being told at an exhibition at the Royal Cornwall Museum.

The Lego Group said the spill was an "unfortunate accident".

Tracey Williams who has studied the event and documents finds on Facebook , said the fishing industry regularly finds more of the Lego where it sank, 20 miles off the coast.

Different pieces are also now starting to emerge more.

The exhibition in Truro, called Adrift: Lost at sea, was inspired by a book she wrote on the incident, which she described as "part whimsical and part doom-laden".

She told the BBC a "community of thousands" had formed over the years, who she was very grateful to for coming forward with their finds.

Ms Williams said: "For the last 26 years, beach combers have been finding the Lego that floated, but back in the day most of the Lego actually sank to the bottom of the sea bed and has stayed there ever since.

"So the fishermen are still picking it up on a weekly basis... we've got a huge haul."

"They've been in touch with me... they will show me or hand me their latest catch of the day," she said.

She explained that the Lego pieces' fate depended on the materials they were made from, and some have taken many years to be swept along the sea bed, picked up by currents and brought to shore.

Oceanographers are now using the lost Lego to better understand ocean currents.

A study of the pieces by the University of Plymouth published in 2020 suggested a Lego brick could survive in the ocean for as many as 1,300 years.

A spokesperson for the Lego Group said they "don't ever want Lego bricks to end up in the sea" and the spill was "an unfortunate accident".

They said: "We are serious about our role in helping to look after the planet and we have a bold sustainability strategy that aims to leave a positive impact for future generations."

Lego pieces lost at sea include:

• 352,000 pairs of diver fins
• 97,500 miniature scuba tanks
• 88,316 sets of tiny flowers
• 54,000 pieces of seagrass
• 33,941 dragons - 514 were green
• 26,600 yellow lifejackets for mini-figures
• 26,400 pieces of ship's rigging

Ms Williams' Lego Lost at Sea project was awarded Rescue Project of the Year in the Current Archaeology Awards 2023.

Bryony Robins, artistic director of the museum, said: "It's such a captivating story, we've never done an exhibition like this.

"It does really appeal to a lot of the people because obviously children love the Lego story but there's a lot of really hard-hitting stories in there as well for adults who want to read and understand it in a bit more depth."

She said in conjunction with the display, the museum was providing free activities to inspire children on helping the marine environment, and showing work by artist Rob Arnold, including a sculpture made from plastics found on Cornish beaches.

"It's not just leading people with that sense of climate anxiety, but also offering them a way that they can contribute as well," she said.

The display is open until 23 September.

Follow BBC News South West on Twitter , Facebook and Instagram . Send your story ideas to [email protected]

Related Topics

More on this story.

Fishing nets and false teeth: Meet the debris hunters

• Published 6 May 2018

Mapped: The beaches where Lego washes up

• Published 3 January 2015

The beaches where Lego keeps washing up

• Published 21 July 2014

Related Internet Links

Royal Cornwall Museum

Why LEGO Pieces Have Been Washing Up on English Beaches for 25 Years

By michele debczak | feb 22, 2022.

February 13, 2022, marked a bizarre anniversary in the history of ocean pollution. On that day in 1997, a giant wave swept 4.8 million LEGO pieces into waters 20 miles off the coast of Cornwall in the UK. A quarter of a century later, the tiny plastic toys are still washing up on England's southwestern shores.

According to Smithsonian , the Great LEGO Spill is considered the worst-ever toy-related environmental catastrophe. It occurred when a cargo ship named Tokio Express was transporting goods from Rotterdam in the Netherlands to New York. A 28-foot wave toppled 62 shipping containers off the vessel, dumping items like superglue and disposable lighters into the sea. One box held LEGO sets , that—in a strange twist—were largely nautical-themed. That's the casualty that has gotten the most attention in the 25 years since the incident.

Beachcombers continue to find miniature flippers, harpoons, and octopuses in the sand to this day. Though the LEGO recoveries have been concentrated in Cornwall , American oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer estimated that the pieces could have drifted 62,000 miles across the world's oceans. Roughly 3.2 million of the lost LEGOs are light enough to float, which means the other 1.6 million have likely ended up on the seabed. They are destined to stay there for a while; according to a 2020 study , it will take 1300 years for the LEGOs lost at sea to fully break down.

The 1997 accident isn't the first disaster of its kind. After years of Garfield phones washing ashore in France , investigators traced their source to a shipping container that fell off a cargo ship in the 1980s. Both incidents demonstrate how the plastic we dump in the ocean isn't as easy to ignore as we may hope.

[h/t Smithsonian ]

Keep up to date with the Big Issue

The leading voice on life, politics, culture and social activism direct to your inbox.

What 4,756,940 pieces of Lego lost at sea tell us about our attitudes to plastic pollution

In 1997, a shipping container holding millions of Lego pieces fell into the sea. As they washed ashore, Tracey Williams began to record what she found... and she's still going.

Lego lifeboat, run ashore. Photo: Courtesy of Tracey Williams

If you search carefully along the strandline after a wild winter storm, you might still find them. Tiny yellow life jackets and grey scuba tanks. Bright-green plastic seagrass and little spear guns in red and yellow. Blue, black and red divers’ flippers and miniature cutlasses. Perhaps a dragon or an octopus, just three inches long. Maybe even a small yellow life raft. They’re from an armada of Lego that fell off a ship in 1997. And they’re still turning up today.

The curious tale of the Lego lost at sea began on Thursday February 13, 1997, when a cargo ship laden with goods was hit by a storm. The Tokio Express had set sail from Rotterdam when it became engulfed in mountainous seas 20 miles off Land’s End, Cornwall.

In what the ship’s captain later described as a “once in a 100-year phenomenon”, a rogue wave tilted the vessel 60 degrees one way, then 40 degrees back, sending 62 shipping containers toppling into the ocean. One held nearly five million pieces of Lego, on its way from the toy company’s factory in Billund, Denmark to North America, where it was to be made up into sets.

By a strange quirk of fate, much of the Lego was sea-themed; 4,756,940 pieces of plastic, bound for seafaring adventures. No one is sure what happened next – whether the container of Lego burst open on impact, scattering its contents into the ocean, or whether it carried on floating for a while, slowly releasing its cargo as it drifted to the seabed.

But in the days that followed, helicopter pilots flying over the area reported seeing ‘a slick of Lego’ floating in the sea. And beachgoers started finding Lego washed up on Cornwall’s wild and windswept shores.

When my children were young, searching for Lego on the shores beneath our family home on the south coast of Devon became the highlight of any trip to the beach. Every weekend would involve a treasure hunt. A cork, a feather, two Lego flippers, a heart-shaped stone.

We noticed the smaller pieces first. Tiny life jackets strewn along the strandline, spear guns and scuba tanks scattered across the sand, flippers and flowers floating in rock pools. We gathered the pieces up in their hundreds, storing them at first in old ice-cream tubs on the kitchen windowsill.

It was the dragons that captured everyone’s imagination. There were 33,941 inside the container that fell off the Tokio Express – 33,427 black dragons and 514 green. While the black dragons washed ashore in their thousands, the green ones proved to be far more elusive.

Over the years, I largely forgot about the Lego. But in 2010, I moved to the north coast of Cornwall. And on my first visit to the beach, I found a bright yellow Lego life jacket from the spill.

Thirteen years on and it was still turning up. I was amazed. There wasn’t just Lego on the strandline, though. There was so much plastic. Shoes, buoys, rope, bottles. Some from shipping, some from fishing, some left behind by beachgoers. But where did all the rest come from? The toothbrushes, the bookies’ pens, the paintbrushes and Monopoly houses?

Horrified at the amount of plastic now littering the beach, I joined the barefoot army of dogwalkers, surfers and beachgoers picking up debris from Cornwall’s shores. I began working round the tides, often leaving the house before dawn to roam the coastline with my rescue dog, Jess.

As a child I was frightened of wading through seaweed, feeling the fronds wrapping around my legs. It’s known as fykiaphobia – the fear of seaweed – though these days I am more afraid of what lurks within it, rather than the seaweed itself. Old clothes, combs and the remains of mobile phones. Keys from typewriters, computer keyboards and calculators. Carpet remnants and golf balls. Cable ties, hairbands and frisbees. Divers’ fins, curtain hooks, deflated footballs. Bank cards, razor heads, medical lancets.

There are fragments of plastic bottles too, thousands and thousands of them. While bottle caps often float ashore, the bottles themselves sink to the bottom of the sea, breaking apart into smaller and smaller pieces. Sometimes all we find are their faded bases, looking curiously like stranded jellyfish.

No one knows how many goods from cargo spills are lying on the ocean floor. No one really knows how many items from shipping containers fall overboard every year. Currently, lost goods only have to be declared if they are classed as hazardous.

The responses of companies to cargo spills vary wildly. Some are full of remorse, keen to make amends. They fund beach cleans, offer to send teams of people to pick up lost cargo from beaches, set up hotlines and provide recycling facilities. Others keep silent, perhaps not wanting the embarrassment, inconvenience or legal implications of a cargo spill.

At any time, there are over 6,000 ships carrying containers around the world, huge vessels transporting 226 million giant boxes a year. Now stacked higher than ever before, they transport everything from trainers to televisions, chairs to car tyres, motorbikes to medical tape. As Rose George says in her book, Deep Sea and Foreign Going , 90 per cent of everything we wear, eat and consume is brought to us by these huge floating warehouses. Some carry more than 23,000 containers at a time.

However, not all make it safely to their destination. In its 2020 report, the World Shipping Council revealed an average of 1,382 containers had fallen overboard each year for the past 12 years. That figure was calculated before over 3,000 containers fell into the Pacific Ocean between October 2020 and January 2021, though.

In many ways, the curious tale of the Lego lost at sea is a story without an end, a vast jigsaw with millions of missing pieces. An ocean mystery that fascinates some but horrifies others. Where is all the Lego seldom seen – the sharks, magic wands and witches’ hats?

Maybe some of the Lego lying on the seabed will continue making its way ashore for years to come, swept hundreds of miles by sea floor currents.

For many people who pick up plastic from beaches, finding a bit of ‘treasure’ is what makes it fun – a Lego dragon, a toy soldier, a Smarties lid, a tiny dinosaur – but obviously it would be better if it wasn’t there at all.

As 11-year-old Laura, finder of a Lego octopus, said after one of our beach cleans many moons ago: “I like to find treasure. But what I like to find most is a clean beach.”

@LegoLostAtSea

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine out this week. Support your local vendor by buying today! If you cannot reach  your local vendor , you can still click  HERE  to subscribe to The Big Issue today or give a gift  subscription  to a friend or family member. You can also purchase one-off issues from  The Big Issue Shop  or The Big Issue app, available now from the  App Store  or  Google Play .

• Environment
• From the magazine
• Plastic pollution

Support the Big Issue

Recommended for you

Meet the chemical engineer producing carbon-free fuel to keep our world running

We're in a race to build first new reservoirs in decades before Britain's taps run dry

Who owns the moon? How the lunar frontier could become the new Wild West 

Hedgerows are amazing. Here's why we must plant more of them

Most popular.

Renters pay their landlords' buy-to-let mortgages, so they should get a share of the profits

Exclusive: Disabled people are 'set up to fail' by the DWP in target-driven disability benefits system, whistleblowers reveal

Cost of living payment 2024: Where to get help now the scheme is over

Strike dates 2023: From train drivers to NHS doctors, here are the dates to know

Get our free pet archive magazine special.

5 million Lego pieces plunged into the sea off Cornwall 25 years ago

Tiny plastic lifejackets, flippers, dragons and octopuses from one of 62 containers swept off a cargo ship in rough seas are still washing up on beaches today

• 06:00, 13 FEB 2022

Sign up for our Daily Newsletter for the latest local news straight to your inbox

We have more newsletters

If you find a piece of Lego on the beach in Cornwall today, chances are it’s one of almost five million multi-coloured little bits that were swept into the sea off Land’s End exactly 25 years ago.

On the morning of February 13, 1997, 28ft freak waves struck the Holland to New-York bound Tokio Express cargo ship 20 miles off the mainland. With the vessel tilting backwards and forwards, 62 huge containers packed with a wide variety of freight tumbled off the deck into the water, many sinking straight to the bottom.

One of them was packed to the gunwales with a myriad of water-themed little Lego pieces, including divers’ flippers, octopuses, scuba tanks, spear guns, seagrass, life rafts and jackets, whales, dolphins and dragons, as well as cutlasses and witches’ brooms.

Initially it wasn’t this haul of sunken Lego Aquazone and Pirates kits that grabbed the headlines. A far more imminent danger was causing concern. The following morning the Western Morning News carried a worrying report that 17 metal cases from the ship, each the size of a double decker bus, were bobbing along in rough seas towards The Lizard and several of them were carrying hazardous chemicals and irritant superglue.

With fears that some containers could explode if the chemicals were exposed to the air, a Falmouth Coastguard tug began travelling alongside the giant flotsam to ward off all shipping, especially small fishing craft, while local people and beachcombers were told not to open the 40ft containers if they did wash ashore.

A few days later, after finger-sized capsules of the irritant resin methyl methacrylate started washing up on Cornish beaches, including Loe Bar and The Lizard, the fire service and coastguards mounted a big clean-up operation.

Inshore trawler and dredger fishermen working off Wolf Rock in South Cornwall worried about damage to their boats and equipment, but the government didn't feel the need to take action, saying the chemicals weren’t a danger after all.

Meanwhile, the full lost container count was confirmed as 62, and up on the South Devon coast, it was the 10,000 disposable lighters coming ashore that were alarming South Hams District Council. The contents of another container from the Tokio Express, children were warned not to touch them, while council workers scoured the sands.

The tale faded away gradually until almost six years later when the Lego container finally hit land at Devon’s Bantham Beach in January 2003 and a slick of bricks and bits followed. Lego company officials issued a finders keepers statement telling people they were welcome to take any pieces they found, but they should wash them well first. The firm also opened a hotline so people could report where they picked them up and the business could offer to help with any clean up operations.

Tokio Express Lego pieces have been washing up on beaches in Cornwall and Devon, as well as much further afield, for more than two decades now. Some items, like octopuses and green dragons, are rare and much sought after by collectors, while other more humdrum bits are mostly swept up for recycling.

One beachcomber and environmental campaigner who was captivated by the Lego spill saga is North Cornwall-based writer Tracey Williams who tells the extended story of the Lego spill and its aftermath, as well as the mountains of other weird plastic flotsam that comes in with the tides, in her new book, Adrift: The Curious Tale of the Lego Lost at Sea, published by Unicorn.

Tracey, an avid beach cleaner who also researches the long and short-term impact of plastics lost at sea, has discovered hundreds of Tokio Express lost Lego pieces over the years. She made it her mission to track some of their epic journeys and share news with fellow collectors via the Facebook community page Lego Lost at Sea which now has thousands of subscribers.

Do you remember the Tokio Express drama at the time? Or have you found a bit of rare Lego on your local beach? Do let us know in the comments below.

Love nostalgia? Have the best articles emailed to you for free with our new weekly nostalgia newsletter. Click here to see all the Cornwall Live newsletters.

• Cornwall beaches
• Environment
• Most Recent

MORE SECTIONS

• Dear Deidre
• Visual Stories

MORE FROM THE SUN

• Newsletters
• Deliver my newspaper
• Sun Vouchers
• The Sun Digital Newspaper

Millions of shipwrecked Lego pieces still washing up 25 years after container disaster

• Published : 17:48, 14 Feb 2022
• Updated : 17:55, 14 Feb 2022

BEACHGOERS in Cornwall, UK routinely find Lego pieces washing up onshore – here's why.

Lego toys have been appearing on the southwest coast of England for 25 years after a container ship was hit by a rogue wave in 1997.

The ship, named Tokio Express, contained several dozen containers onboard that were swallowed up by the ocean, including one that held 5 million pieces of Lego.

The event has been designated the "Great Lego Spill" and is considered to be one of the worst toy-related environmental disasters as even in 2022, the ocean is still spewing Lego onto the shore.

The spill has been documented by Tracey Williams for years – this month she published her findings in a book entitled Adrift: The Curious Tale of the Lego Lost at Sea.

"In 2010, I moved to Cornwall to be close to my family, and on my first trip to the beach, I noticed Legos from the spill again," Williams told Live Science .

"I was amazed that it was still washing up after all that time," she added.

Williams has also taken to Instagram ( @legolostatsea ), where she boasts thousands of followers, to share her Lego-finding journey.

Most read in Tech

Chilling new AI robot designed to learn human behaviour in just 24 HOURS

iPhone owner raves over ‘best use’ for special button that’s easy to forget

Premier League issues 'stark warning' over illegal IPTV used by 900,000

'10 second toothbrush' saves time in mornings but here's why I'm not converting

Interestingly enough, as Williams showcases in both her book and Instagram, many of the uncovered Lego pieces were meant to be a part of sea-themed sets.

Among the minuscule bricks lost at sea were 418,000 LEGO flippers, 97,500 scuba tanks, 26,600 life preservers, 13,000 spearguns, and 4,200 octopuses.

Williams also noted in her book that the Lego spill potentially traveled incredible distances – even as far as the southern shore of the continental United States.

"A Beachcomber in the USA had discovered a black LEGO octopus tangled in thick dried seagrass on Galveston Island, Texas," she wrote, adding that it could have been from the spill.

To this day, it's not clear just how many Lego pieces are still in the ocean, but it seems that the lighter pieces are the ones that most commonly wash up onshore.

Beachgoers have also spotted some heavier Lego pieces, which are potentially washing up due to containing air pockets.

"What we're finding now are the pieces that sank as well as the pieces that floated," Williams said.

"It's providing us with an insight into what happens to plastic in the ocean, how far it drifts — both on the surface of the ocean but also along the seabed — and what happens to it as it breaks down," she added.

In other news, Nasa has upgraded its  asteroid hazard software  with some key changes that should help it better detect potentially dangerous space rocks.

Nasa has revealed  stunning footage of a solar  flare in action.

And, the US space agency is planning for  a 'golden asteroid'  probing mission to launch this summer.

We pay for your stories!

Do you have a story for The US Sun team?

Email us at  [email protected]  or call  212 416 4552 .

Like us on Facebook at  www.facebook.com/TheSunUS  and follow us from our main Twitter account at  @TheSunUS

• Rare toys and collectibles

MORE SECTIONS

• Social Casino

MORE FROM THE SUN

• Newsletters

Millions of shipwrecked Lego pieces still washing up 25 years after container disaster

• Published : 12:48 ET, Feb 14 2022
• Updated : 12:55 ET, Feb 14 2022

BEACHGOERS in Cornwall, UK routinely find Lego pieces washing up onshore – here's why.

Lego toys have been appearing on the southwest coast of England for 25 years after a container ship was hit by a rogue wave in 1997.

The ship, named Tokio Express, contained several dozen containers onboard that were swallowed up by the ocean, including one that held 5 million pieces of Lego.

The event has been designated the "Great Lego Spill" and is considered to be one of the worst toy-related environmental disasters as even in 2022, the ocean is still spewing Lego onto the shore.

The spill has been documented by Tracey Williams for years – this month she published her findings in a book entitled Adrift: The Curious Tale of the Lego Lost at Sea.

"In 2010, I moved to Cornwall to be close to my family, and on my first trip to the beach, I noticed Legos from the spill again," Williams told Live Science .

"I was amazed that it was still washing up after all that time," she added.

Williams has also taken to Instagram ( @legolostatsea ), where she boasts thousands of followers, to share her Lego-finding journey.

Most read in News Tech

Your old iPod could be worth $29k and even more common models selling for $500

Following simple 'phone call rule' can save you from AI ‘voice cloning’ attack

Millions of Amazon shoppers eligible to claim $120 food delivery perk for free

Sinister ‘no connection’ sign reveals if you’ve been hit by ‘SIM swap’ attack

Interestingly enough, as Williams showcases in both her book and Instagram, many of the uncovered Lego pieces were meant to be a part of sea-themed sets.

Among the minuscule bricks lost at sea were 418,000 LEGO flippers, 97,500 scuba tanks, 26,600 life preservers, 13,000 spearguns, and 4,200 octopuses.

Williams also noted in her book that the Lego spill potentially traveled incredible distances – even as far as the southern shore of the continental United States.

"A Beachcomber in the USA had discovered a black LEGO octopus tangled in thick dried seagrass on Galveston Island, Texas," she wrote, adding that it could have been from the spill.

To this day, it's not clear just how many Lego pieces are still in the ocean, but it seems that the lighter pieces are the ones that most commonly wash up onshore.

Beachgoers have also spotted some heavier Lego pieces, which are potentially washing up due to containing air pockets.

"What we're finding now are the pieces that sank as well as the pieces that floated," Williams said.

"It's providing us with an insight into what happens to plastic in the ocean, how far it drifts — both on the surface of the ocean but also along the seabed — and what happens to it as it breaks down," she added.

In other news, Nasa has upgraded its  asteroid hazard software  with some key changes that should help it better detect potentially dangerous space rocks.

Nasa has revealed  stunning footage of a solar  flare in action.

And, the US space agency is planning for  a 'golden asteroid'  probing mission to launch this summer.

We pay for your stories!

Do you have a story for The US Sun team?

Email us at  [email protected]  or call  212 416 4552 .

Like us on Facebook at  www.facebook.com/TheSunUS  and follow us from our main Twitter account at  @TheSunUS

• Rare toys and collectibles

Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

US Edition Change

• US election 2024
• US Politics
• UK Politics
• News Videos
• Rugby Union
• Sports Videos
• Photography
• Theatre & Dance
• Culture Videos
• Food & Drink
• Health & Families
• Royal Family
• Electric Vehicles
• Lifestyle Videos
• News & Advice
• Simon Calder
• Inspiration
• City Guides
• Sustainable Travel
• Politics Explained
• News Analysis
• Home & Garden
• Fashion & Beauty
• Travel & Outdoors
• Sports & Fitness
• Sustainable Living
• Climate Videos
• Electric vehicles
• Behind The Headlines
• On The Ground
• Decomplicated
• You Ask The Questions
• Binge Watch
• Travel Smart
• Watch on your TV
• Crosswords & Puzzles
• Most Commented
• Newsletters
• Ask Me Anything
• Virtual Events

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in Please refresh your browser to be logged in

Lego legacy: The 26-year mystery of fantasy worlds lost at sea

The world’s oceans still hide the secret of millions of pieces – and one woman’s fascination with the miniatures became a global award-winning project that’s inspired a book and a film, writes jane dalton, article bookmarked.

Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile

Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world

Sign up to our free morning headlines email, thanks for signing up to the morning headlines email.

T here are black bats and witches’ hats, brooms and frying pans, dragons and magic wands, monster feet and life rafts. There’s even a news crew.

It’s an array of random miniature objects, and together they make up a vast, fantastical, swashbuckling kingdom – but one that has been lost in the expanses of the oceans.

On 13 February 1997, a cargo ship heading from the Netherlands to the USA was hit by a freak storm wave off Cornwall, sending 62 crates crashing into the ocean. One contained nearly five million pieces of Lego , destined to be part of various brick sets.

They were being sent from the company’s home in Denmark, and as chance would have it, much of the Lego was sea-themed.

• Lego bricks in the ocean could take 1,300 years to degrade
• Teddy bear lovingly restored after washing up on beach in storm
• Cornwall students fundraising for ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ US Lego competition trip

Only a fraction of the items have ever been recovered, and are still washing ashore to this day – not just in southern England, but also Ireland, Belgium, the Scilly Isles and the Channel Islands, and possibly as far as Australia and the US.

Thirteen years after the accident, Tracey Williams moved to Cornwall. Already a seasoned beachcomber, she started finding 3cm-4cm Lego pieces on the sand.

“I thought it was astonishing 13 years on that it was still washing ashore. So I set up a Facebook page to see who else had found the Lego pieces and where, and that’s how it all began,” Ms Williams tells The Independent .

As word spread, she began documenting pieces of Lego from the stricken Tokio Express, unaware then that her work would snowball into a globally recognised award-winning project, involving oceanographers, and inspiring a book, an exhibition and even a film.

For Ms Williams, a mother of four who is passionate about protecting marine life from pollution, the Lego spill became a full-time preoccupation.

Today the “Lego lady”, as she is known in Cornwall’s fishing villages, still meets trawlers as they come in, and it’s to her that fishermen report findings of Lego miniatures caught in their nets every week.

Few of the 4,756,940 miniature replica items lost to the sea were bricks; instead they include 352,000 pairs of divers’ flippers; 97,500 miniature scuba tanks; 92,400 cutlasses; 50,000 brooms; 88,316 bunches of flowers; 26,600 lifejackets and 26,400 pieces of ships’ rigging.

There were also 28,700 life rafts and more than 18,000 pieces for reefs and castle walls that featured in Lego sets such as Witch’s Magic Manor and Pirates Perilous Pitfall.

The 33,941 dragons have captured the imagination of many. Black dragons washed ashore in their thousands but only 514 dragons were green, and only a handful of those have been found.

The most coveted pieces, however, are black octopuses. Only 4,200 were in the cargo.

“It is said that octopuses are masters of disguise, blending into the background to escape detection. Lego octopuses are no different. When tangled in seaweed, they can be almost impossible to spot. I found my first Lego octopus back in 1997 but didn’t discover another for 18 years,” Ms Williams writes in her book, Adrift .

The “Lego lady” says judging how many Tokio Express Lego pieces in all have been found is impossible, because bits had turned up for years before she started logging them, while other pieces found abroad cannot definitively be traced to that container.

“Millions of pieces are still unaccounted for, thought to be lying on the seabed. These are the bricks or elements made of denser plastics, which don’t float, the ones thought to have sunk to the seabed,” she says.

One numerous find is white doorframes. But there were 51,800 sharks, none of which has ever been reported to her as found.

And then there’s the Crisis News Crew, a set released by Lego in 1997 including a cameraman, a female newsreader and two cameras. There were 59,500 pieces, but Ms Williams has only ever seen one.

Mini-flippers have been reported in Australia, although even with serial numbers it’s impossible to prove they came from the 1997 sinking.

Just this week, someone in South Carolina asked whether the Lego octopus his mother found on a beach there in the early 2000s could be from the spill.

For beachcombers, coming across a Lego piece from the accident 20 miles off Land’s End is like finding treasure, and some do a “happy dance”.

“One of my favourite finds was a little tiny tool wheel. Only one has ever been found, and I often wonder whether all the Lego men in the shipping container use them to escape,” Ms Williams says.

Scientists she has worked with have calculated Lego can last up to 1,300 years underwater.

Lego the company, which said it would love to turn back the clock to prevent the spill – although it was beyond its control, sent an inventory of the container contents to oceanographers.

One, Dr Curtis Ebbesmeyer, predicted at the time that ocean currents would carry the Lego past Norway into the Arctic Ocean and Alaska. Some, he said, might even reach Japan and across the Pacific Ocean to western Canada and California.

The Lego spill and other ocean plastics have come to dominate Ms Williams’s life. “I was fascinated by objects washed up by the sea and the story behind them,” she says.

“Every morning I check the tide times. I get up early and go to the beach at 5am then work around the tides, combining work and beachcombing.”

Asked whether pieces have become valuable mementoes, she says it’s illegal to resell them, as they must be reported to the government Receiver of Wreck.

Her Lego Lost at Sea project, which won the Rescue Project of the Year title in this year’s Current Archaeology Awards, is the subject of a new exhibition at the Royal Cornwall Museum.

While the Tokio Express limped back to Southampton for repair, the fate of the Lego container itself – whether it broke up or is on the seabed, still guarding its horde – remains a mystery.

Now Ms Williams is working with an independent film crew. “We’re interested now in finding out whether the container still exists. All the Lego pieces we’ve never seen. The 50,000 sharks, for instance – are they still trapped?” she says.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.

New to The Independent?

Or if you would prefer:

Want an ad-free experience?

Hi {{indy.fullName}}

• My Independent Premium
• Account details
• Help centre

An Epic Lego Shipwreck Has Been Washing Thousands of Lego Onto Beaches

Travel local.

BBC News recently reported on a pretty rad story out of Cornwall, UK. Way back in 1997 a shipping container carrying 4.8 million Lego pieces fell into the sea, roughly 20 miles from Land’s End. 17 years later the tide is still washing loads of Lego onto beaches around Cornwall. There have also been discoveries of Lego in Devon, Ireland and Wales.

The container ship carrying the Lego, the Tokio Express , “was hit by a wave described by its captain as a ‘once in a 100-year phenomenon,’ tilting the ship 60 degrees one way, then 40 degrees back.” Ironically, many of the Lego pieces were nautical-themed, from the Aquazone line . For years, children and adults have been combing the Cornwall coasts in search of the little plastic bricks. Local Tracey Williams has even created a Facebook page that chronicles her findings, it’s super-cutely called “Lego Lost at Sea.”

Since 1997, those pieces could have drifted 62,000 miles, he says. It's 24,000 miles around the equator, meaning they could be on any beach on earth. Theoretically, the pieces of Lego could keep going around the ocean for centuries.

The Lego Lost At Sea facebook page was created by British writer and intrepdi beachcomber, Tracey Williams, "who first started to discover pieces of sea themed Lego on beaches around her family home in South Devon, England in the late 1990s." Currently, she lives in Cornwall, "near where the shipwrecked Lego still washes up daily." Tracey is also invovled in the beach-cleaning group Newquay Beach Care.

These Lego dragons are just two of 33,941 Lego dragons. They washed up in Bigbury on Sea, South Devon, England in the late-90s.

This epic Lego shipwreck is also providing a lot of insight into the movement of ocean currents and the tides.

"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.” - US oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer

Williams even wonders whether the "Lego armada" could have even been swept as far as Australia:

Patricia sent us this picture of a Lego flipper she found washed up in Port Phillip Bay, Melbourne sometime in the last five years. We don't know for certain whether this is from the Tokio Express or not but according to oceanographer Dr Curtis Ebbesmeyer 'it's possible that after 17 years, a Lego flipper could have made it to Australia'.

According to the Beachcombers’ Alert , (2,2 1997) “The Lost Lego Pieces Cargo included:”

Toy kits - Divers, Aquazone, Aquanauts, Police, FrightKnights, WildWest, RoboForce TimeCruisers, Outback, Pirates Spear guns (red and yellow) - 13,000 items Black octopus - 4,200 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

Here's Williams' Lego ID guide for the pieces she's found thus far:

While it’s pretty cool that there’s tons of Lego washing up on beaches to the delight of children and adults who love finding little plastic treasure, there are some major environmental concerns with over 4 million pieces of plastic floating around the ocean and washing ashore.

Read more on BBC News .

Support HuffPost

Our 2024 coverage needs you, your loyalty means the world to us.

At HuffPost, we believe that everyone needs high-quality journalism, but we understand that not everyone can afford to pay for expensive news subscriptions. That is why we are committed to providing deeply reported, carefully fact-checked news that is freely accessible to everyone.

Whether you come to HuffPost for updates on the 2024 presidential race, hard-hitting investigations into critical issues facing our country today, or trending stories that make you laugh, we appreciate you. The truth is, news costs money to produce, and we are proud that we have never put our stories behind an expensive paywall.

Would you join us to help keep our stories free for all? Your contribution of as little as $2 will go a long way.

Can't afford to donate? Support HuffPost by creating a free account and log in while you read.

As Americans head to the polls in 2024, the very future of our country is at stake. At HuffPost, we believe that a free press is critical to creating well-informed voters. That's why our journalism is free for everyone, even though other newsrooms retreat behind expensive paywalls.

Our journalists will continue to cover the twists and turns during this historic presidential election. With your help, we'll bring you hard-hitting investigations, well-researched analysis and timely takes you can't find elsewhere. Reporting in this current political climate is a responsibility we do not take lightly, and we thank you for your support.

Contribute as little as $2 to keep our news free for all.

Dear HuffPost Reader

Thank you for your past contribution to HuffPost. We are sincerely grateful for readers like you who help us ensure that we can keep our journalism free for everyone.

The stakes are high this year, and our 2024 coverage could use continued support. Would you consider becoming a regular HuffPost contributor?

The stakes are high this year, and our 2024 coverage could use continued support. If circumstances have changed since you last contributed, we hope you’ll consider contributing to HuffPost once more.

Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages.

Popular in the Community

From our partner, more in weird news.

Symphony Of The Seas

Recommended

Submit a product idea.

Opens in a new window