The World's Strangest Ship and Research Lab

This ship was conceived and developed by the Marine Physical Laboratory (MPL) at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. "FLIP stands for Floating Instrument Platform: it is actually a huge specialized buoy. One of its creators described it as looking like a 355-foot long ( 108 m) baseball bat. If that isn't unusual enough, it really flips!. "When the ship is in the horizontal traveling mode, the long, hollow ballast area trails behind. When it reaches the desired location, the "tail" is flooded until the nose sticks straight up into the air, taking about twenty-eight minutes to reach vertical position."



