Golf Balls: The Litter of the Leisure Class

Just about anyone who loves golf has, at least a time or two, whacked a ball somewhere where golfing is not exactly sanctioned.

Just ask the researchers who used a submarine to search for the Loch Ness monster and instead found ... you guessed it. Locals are using the loch as a driving range.

There's even some golf balls on the moon (courtesy Alan Shepard, 1971).

Thing is, all these balls — including many near golf courses that get lost and not found — take a century and perhaps up to 1,000 years to decompose, CNN reports. And when they do come apart, they release zinc that can poison the soil.

Here's our favorite tee shot:

A Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin set a new record for the longest golf drive in history in 2006 after hitting a lightweight ball into orbit from the International Space Station. Tyurin shanked it, but it still traveled about 1 million miles before falling into the atmosphere and burning up.