A while back I was (very tangentially) involved in an investigation relating to a near-disaster relating to this. https://www.taic.org.nz/inquiry/mo-2007-207 ht

A while back I was (very tangentially) involved in an investigation relating to a near-disaster relating to this. https://www.taic.org.nz/inquiry/mo-2007-207 https://www.taic.org.nz/inquiry/mo-2007-207 Iron ore is heavy and hard to transport. But at some points in the production process, the ore often ends up as a sort of "sand", and if you mix it with water you can get a slurry. Sometimes iron ore is transported by pipeline, and one thing you can do (and is done not infrequently) is pump the ore slurry into a ship, drain the water, and then sail to another port, pump water back in, pump the slurry back to shore, and repeat. If for some reason you can't drain the water (due to equipment failure or running out of time due to an approaching storm), and leave port with a cargo full of ore slurry, then as the ship rocks back and forth, waves can deposit more and more iron sand on one side of the ship, causing a gradually increasing list. And of course, once you've got a list, gravity brings more and more iron sand to the lower side, increasing the list. The report downplays it a bit, but in the linked case the ship was quite close to just flipping upside down and sinking by the time they made it to shelter. An interesting reversal of the issue in the original link, since rather than dry cargo becoming inadvertently liquefied, here the cargo started liquefied, but was incorrectly not de-liquefied. Amusingly, while trying to find the report to refresh my memory, I found the same ship had ANOTHER incident with the same cargo two years later: https://www.taic.org.nz/inquiry/mo-2009-210 https://www.taic.org.nz/inquiry/mo-2009-210 Liquefied cargo is oddly dangerous.