Interesting story...

Canon EOS 1000D washes ashore in BC, Canada, SD card reveals it was lost at sea for over a year -- Engadget (http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/27/canon-eos-1000d-washes-ashore-sd-card-reveals-it-was-lost-at-se/)

At least the SanDisk Extreme III card still works.

SanDisk should run with the story and make a commercial. If I were in their PR dept I'd push in that direction. What an opportunity!

Camera Lost at Sea Returned with the Help of Social Networking | Work + Money - Yahoo! Shine (http://shine.yahoo.com/work-money/camera-lost-sea-returned-help-social-networking-215800650.html)

"Just how tough is your average DSLR memory card? Apparently tough enough to survive a year at the bottom of the ocean. Naturalist and aspiring photographer Markus Thompson was scuba diving in Deep Bay near Vancouver, British Columbia, when he found a Canon EOS 1000D. Curious, he brought it to the surface and took ut the SD card, and was actually able to recover about 50 photos......."

I'm not so sure it's that big a feat. Par for the course for solid state memory I think. As I recall from articles at the time, the Shuttle Challenger cockpit screens showed data held in core memory which holds it's state without power. Forensic scientists where able to read the screens at the time they lost power by reading that memory.

Didn't Alister Chapman freeze an SxS card in solid ice for a few hours to show how rugged those cards are?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3dPhVAXS68

I wonder if SxS can last a year in water or ice.