I was looking at Memepool earlier today, and came across this absolutely wonderful entry about an old ocean liner, which was being towed to Thailand nine years ago when it broke loose in a storm and wound up beached and abandoned and disintegrating away on one of the Canary Islands. The photographs of the hulk are stunning. Like industrial archaeology. I'm fascinated to see relics of our technological civilisation left to rot in the elements as if the culture that built them is already dead and forgotten; perhaps in a thousand years something like this will be our version of the Pyramids, left to titillate our successors with a whiff of entropy and the lost voices of dead souls.

I tried to employ the infinite bounty of Google to find more such hulks, with mixed success. I found here that Powell River, British Columbia has a breakwater made of ten old cargo vessels, built originally during the World Wars out of bloody concrete. I know steel was in great demand and all, but that just seems silly. This one, built for World War I, apparently shattered like a teacup when it accidentally bumped into another ship. Oh well, at least the octopi seem to like them. Then of course there are the toxic 'ghost ships' the US just recently sent across to England for dismantling, around whom lawsuits have circulated. And then there are the difficulties the UK is facing disposing of its decommissioned nuclear submarines; old submarines are very photogenic, although I'm having trouble finding any really good shots. Oh well. Oh, and then here's information on a bunch of ships' graveyards in Australia.