How one cargo ship burnt billions of dollars…and made the internet go wild

The Suez Canal, in Egypt, is one of the most important in the world. It serves as an international shipping passage for 50 ships every day, and it accounts for 12% of all global trade. However, on the 23rd of March, the world would spectate an event that would cause economic losses of nearly half a billion euros every hour…and also a few good laughs on the Internet.

The Ever Given ship, owned by Evergreen Marine, a Taiwanese shipping company, has stranded near Suez. Reasons for the even are still not clear, although it has been said the probable cause for this event has been strong winds and poor visibility due to a sandstorm. And getting the ship out of its diagonal position was not an easy task. For starters, the ship is big. One of the biggest cargo ships in the world, in fact, 400 metres long - comparable to the Empire State Building, and weighing 200 thousand metric tonnes, about as heavy as 1333 blue whales, the largest organism on Earth.

That is a lot of size, and a lot of weight to push and manipulate. Analysts predicted it could take days, or even weeks to free the ship from its position. Several approaches were taken, from tugboats to digging sand and rocks surrounding the ship – and luckily, a “spring tide” (not related to the season, by the way!) made the job easier to the people involved to loosen the ship, and by the 29th of March, the ship was once again afloat and navigating, along with around 400 other ships that were forced to wait until the Ever Given was set free.

The Internet, of course, didn’t stay indifferent to this event. Memes sprouted from this disastrous stranding, as they usually do with these sorts of conflicts. Perhaps the most common meme format was the excavator, whose size seemed to make little of a difference to the ship’s situation. Soon it became a meme template, occasionally with different angles.

Others got a little more creative and tried to offer solutions, although this one would’ve probably ruined the products in the containers.

On Twitter, accounts were created portraying the ship itself, or in this case, the workers attempting to free the ship. Sadly, this specific attempt didn’t work.

And finally, the Ever Given ship had to be combined with other memes. We just can’t escape Among Us, can we?

Things have returned to normal, but laughs aside, we might need to consider what can we do to avoid another small accident that causes such a strong economic impact globally. This one cargo ship has single-handedly proven how vulnerable our global economy is.