The little red-haired girl and the magical island

Peter stepped off the long ladder and walkway he’d been climbing to get onto a small platform, somewhat precariously perched on top of a ship unloader.

This was not one of the old, traditional cranes, still standing nearby. Those would swing a scoop down into a ship’s cargo hold where they grabbed bulk goods, like potassium or rock phosphate. Then lifted up the full scoop, swung it in over land and dropped the load into a bunker. From there, a conveyor belt moved the bulk goods up to a big silo for storage. That was the old technology — noisy, dusty and rather slow.

The unloader Peter stood on was their modern replacement. It worked on the Archimedes’ screw principle where you can move even water uphill by using a screw. Instead of slowly, scoop by scoop, a ship was swiftly unloaded by a huge, articulated arm that reached down into the hold to ingest the granular goods, depositing directly onto the conveyor belt for transport to the silo.

Peter looked over at the little operator’s cabin, at the end of its own boom, from where the operator could maneuver the unloader arm all around the hold, to get into every corner. With so much less dust and dirt, since this was an enclosed system. Definitely more efficient.