Watch the Largest Ship in the World Get Built in 76 Seconds

Maersk Line is one of the largest shipping carriers in the world, with a claimed 3.8 million TEUs of capacity. How does the firm move all those giant metal boxes around the world? With giant metal ships, of course.

Maersk is currently hyping its new-fangled Triple-E, a new class of enormous shipping vessel that the company says will be the largest container ship in the world. When the first one is completed at the end of June, it will measure 400 meters long and 59 meters wide, and will carry a whopping 18,000 twenty-foot containers at a time. While the first vessel isn't ready for launch yet, the major steelwork is done. Thanks to 50,000 photos shot over a series of months at the DSME shipyard in Okpo, Korea, you can see what it takes to build one of these monsters:

The whole point for building ships that are larger and larger is economies of scale. It's a lot more efficient to carry 18,000 containers on one ship than it is on two, which saves a hell of a lot of money–on fuel, crew, and maintenance costs, to name a few–and which does offer an environmental benefit over other ships, which Maersk is happy to tout.

(Of course, there's an argument to be made that the multinational consumerism and regional instability of the global marketplace, which is enabled by such super-ships, is less environmentally friendly than not shipping stuff across the world in the first place.)

But we're talking about big-ass ships, not the environmental fuckitude of our hyper-connected world, which means we have to ask: Is this really the world's largest ship?

Well, if we're looking at the all-time record books–and I assure you, we are–the Triple-E design is not the largest ever. That title still resides with the legendary Seawise Giant, a now-decommissioned supertanker that has an absolutely fascinating history. As it turns out, huge ships are really expensive, and oil booms are volatile, which means the Seawise Giant changed hands and names throughout a 30-year career that including being sunk during the Iran-Iraq War and later salvaged.

In its final iteration as the Knock Nevis, following a lengthening procedure (as if it needed to be any bigger), the ship topped out at 458 meters long and displaced 724,239 tons, which makes it the heaviest and longest ship ever built. Then, in 2010, the ship was beached in India and dismantled, likely due to the astronomical costs of running a 30-year-old record-holding vessel.

In fact, the seven longest ships in Wikipedia's fascinating (if potentially incomplete, which is a fascinating proposition on its own, as it's unclear how people might not have records of such enormous objects) list are all oil tankers. A pretty nice portrait of the world's thirst, isn't it?

But the Maersk Triple-E slides in at number eight, and to Maersk's credit, all of the top seven ships are as of now out of service, so when the first one sails, it will be the largest ship currently floating on the world's oceans. Plus, the Triple-E models constructed will  assuredly be the largest container ships ever constructed, besting the Maersk Emma ships that were first built just seven years ago by 2,500 TEUs of capacity.

In fact, thanks to massive shipyards like DSME and increased interest in shipping efficiency, Maersk's vessels have boomed in size in the last few decades, which mirrors much of the industry. Just look at this little graphic from the Triple-E site:

That's a lot of growth right there, and it's all driven by the combined weight of our export-driven economy and the admittedly-impressive engineering prowess of modern shipbuilders like DSME. I suppose that's the result of the relentless twin drives of the economy and innovation, which results in massive ships like this. To be fair, those factors also drive the push for efficiency, and it is pretty interesting that Maersk actually designed it to be a slower ship in order to save on fuel costs. Of course, when you're moving millions of pounds of the world's junk around from continent to continent, every penny counts.