How Shipping Container Disasters Became a Scientific Goldmine | The MIT Press Reader

To the casual observer, the look and feel of shipping containers suggests a world of smooth, lossless transportation, almost immaterial in its implementation of a logistical ideal. However, the system is far from lossless. In fact, during storms and shipwrecks, shipping containers regularly go overboard. Nobody knows exactly how many of these vast, 20- or 40-foot-long steel capsules — stacked in the thousands in the cargo holds of each ship, carrying the stuff of the global economy — are lost each year. Shipping lines and insurance companies keep these figures under wraps. But estimates suggest that of the hundreds of millions in circulation annually, several thousand containers vanish — sometimes forever. And what becomes of the containers that disappear? If they reappear, then the matter is relatively simple. Each standard container carries, on each of its four sides, a code clearly identifying it. The codes for all containers worldwide are distributed by the Bureau International des

To the casual observer, the look and feel of shipping containers suggests a world of smooth, lossless transportation, almost immaterial in its implementation of a logistical ideal. However, the system is far from lossless. In fact, during storms and shipwrecks, shipping containers regularly go overboard. Nobody knows exactly how many of these vast, 20- or 40-foot-long steel capsules — stacked in the thousands in the cargo holds of each ship, carrying the stuff of the global economy — are lost each year. Shipping lines and insurance companies keep these figures under wraps. But estimates sugges