As we learned during the contract dispute at cargo ports on the West Coast that finally ended this year, cargo ships are essential. They keep the things that we now think of as the basic comforts of modern life, from car parts to McDonald’s French fries, flowing around the globe.

Bloomberg Businessweek profiled the Morten Maersk, a massive container ship, as it left Shanghai, China for a trip to the port of Felixstowe in England. It’s more of a photo essay, but pictures are crucial to understand the scale of a single cargo ship, and why the national economy can be effected when the people in charge of loading and unloading them dawdle a little bit. This one ship holds 18,000 shipping containers. To put that in terms that regular people can grasp, that’s 111 million pairs of sneakers, or 182 million iPads. A ship that size with so much cargo only needs 22 crew members, though.

The ship makes the trip from Shanghai to England completely full, but but only has a few containers making the return trip full of exports from Europe to Asia.

How to Haul 182 Million iPads [Bloomberg]

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