Lego Washes Up 18 Years after Loss

On February 13, 1997, 20 miles off the coast of Cornwall, U.K., the container ship Tokio Express was hit by a wave that sent 62 containers overboard. One of them held nearly five million pieces of Lego.

Lego pieces have been washing up on Cornish beaches ever since. 

Many of the pieces lost were nautically themed including 26,600 life preservers; 418,000 diver flippers in pairs of black, blue or red; 13,000 red or yellow spear guns and 4200 black octopuses.

Beachcombers continue to find now well-worn Lego pieces, even though they are getting harder to find.

Mental Floss reports that American oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer estimates that since the spill, the pieces could have floated around 62,000 miles from the site. That is several times greater than the circumference of the equator (approximately 24,000 miles.)

The Lego Lost At Sea facebook page was created by British writer and 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. She now lives in Cornwall, England where the shipwrecked Lego still washes up daily.

Picture credit: Lego Lost at Sea (Facebook)