Scuba Diving club,
Southern California
Scientists
track rubber toys
Critters lost at sea provide
lessons in ocean currents
By Vincent P. Bzdek
|
|
|
This is one of the rescue diving ducks sent to bring in all of the 29,000
ducks that have been lost at sea. |
WASHINGTON, Aug. 31 — They’ve never lost their smiles.
Granted, those
smiles are molded permanently into their plastic heads.
Back in 1992,
a violent storm tossed 20 containers of rubber duckies off the back of a cargo
ship halfway between China and Seattle, and they were quickly presumed lost at
sea. Instead, it appears the castaways embarked on an epic 11-year swim across
three oceans and half the globe. Somehow, they stayed afloat through all
magnitude of wind and wave, weathering several winters likely frozen in an
arctic ice floe and enduring so many days of exposure their once bright yellow
skin has been bleached white as bone.
And now their
voyage may have brought them to the East Coast.
Remnants of
the lost armada of bath toys, which also includes frogs, beavers and turtles —
nearly 29,000 in all — are thought to be streaming down the New England seaboard
right now. Although there are no confirmed sightings in the Atlantic yet,
oceanographers who have documented the movement of flotsam and ice from the
Pacific to the Atlantic via the Arctic Ocean are confident some of the ducks
ended up over here. A breakaway flotilla of ducks is expected to make landfall
in Britain soon as well.
A faded beaver
from the doomed shipment was discovered in July after it washed up on Kruzof
Island in Alaska.
Anyone who
finds one of the three-inch refugees on the East Coast of the United States,
Canada or on Iceland earns a $100 U.S. savings bond from the First Years Inc.,
the company that originally commissioned the toys from a Chinese manufacturer.
Spokeswoman Darlene Hollywood said First Years has received a number of ducks
since offering the reward in July, but they’ve all been the wrong kind.
“We’ve had
quite a few false sightings. ... Apparently, quite a few children bring rubber
duckies to the beach during the summer,” she said.
CULT COLLECTOR’S ITEM
An
authenticated duckie in hand could be worth a lot more than $100, having become
something of a cult collector’s item during 11 years at sea. Only about 400 of
the rare birds have been recovered since the toys went overboard into the
middle of the Pacific more than 4,200 days ago.
And plastic
waterfowl enthusiasts aren’t the only ones intrigued by the Voyage of the Lost
Tub Toys. Using a global network of beachcombers and a National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration computer model, oceanographers Curtis Ebbesmeyer and
James Ingraham have tracked the ducks from the beginning of the voyage in an
effort to better understand the behavior of surface currents.
“I track
everything that floats in the ocean. If it floats, I want to know about it,”
said Ebbesmeyer, who once posed for People magazine mostly naked in a pool full
of rubber duckies.
Every time a
new duck is found, the two scientists plug fresh data into the Ocean Surface
Current Simulator that Ingraham has been working on for 20 years at
NOAA-Fisheries in Seattle. Though primarily used for tracking the drift of fish
eggs to nursery grounds in the north Pacific, the program has been modified to
predict where the ducks might end up next.
The model
accurately forecast duck landings along the Alaskan coast not long after the
spill and again three years later, in Washington state, after the ducks traveled
around the Pacific “gyre,” a huge circular current that Ebbesmeyer said acts
“like a toilet that never flushes.”
The toys also
have been found off Hawaii, Vancouver Island, and the Queen Charlotte Islands
off Canada.
Wanted dead or
alive: Rubber ducky
Relying on
well-known ocean flows, Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham believe that as many as 10,000
of the ducks wandered northeast of Alaska into the Bering Sea. From there, the
only way out is up over the North Pole. By the winter of 1993-1994, the ducks
probably were grafted onto ice packs that move across the Arctic Ocean.
“Wind moves
ice from the Bering Strait over the North Pole down to eastern Greenland at
about a mile a day. That’s five years to get across from the Pacific to the
Atlantic,” Ebbesmeyer said.
Gradually,
south of Greenland, the ice floes began to melt, freeing the ducks to swim
around and around the Atlantic gyre and down into the coastal currents of the
Eastern Seaboard.
STUDYING SURFACE CURRENTS
The timing and
pattern of the ducks’ dispersal has allowed Ingraham to fine-tune his computer
model so that it has become a useful tool in studying the elusive behavior of
surface currents, he said.
Driven
primarily by prevailing winds and the Earth’s rotation, these currents
represent one of the bigger missing pieces in the puzzle of predicting severe
weather such as hurricanes, drought and floods. The currents also determine
most of the world’s major fish migrations, so better knowledge of them could be
invaluable to fishermen.
“The surface
of the ocean is more of an unknown than the bottom,” Ebbesmeyer said. “It’s an
oceanographic blind spot.”
Thanks to the
ducks, Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham can claim credit for an oceanographic truism:
Flotsam is faster than water. The two scientists were able to calculate the
speed of the ducks from their spill point to Sitka, Alaska, where more than 400
of the toys first washed ashore nine months after going overboard. (“Hot tubs
in Sitka were full of them,” Ebbesmeyer said.)
The scientists
found that surface winds were scooting the critters along twice as fast as the
current. It usually takes water about six years to make a full circuit around
the north Pacific; the ducks made it in three.
To their
knowledge, Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham are the only people on the planet who keep
tabs on the world’s flotsam, which at the moment also includes more than 30,000
Nike running shoes, 34,000 hockey gloves, 5 million lost Legos, and a number of
onions.
One man’s
treasure is another man’s trash, of course. Environmentalists have turned a
spotlight on the ducks to highlight what they say is a global epidemic of
overboard cargo. Turns out, 10,000 containers fall off cargo ships each year.
Given an estimated 100 million containers shipped annually, insurance companies
say that’s actually not a bad loss rate.
Trouble is,
the containers float, so they’re sitting out there like little steel icebergs
just waiting to wreak havoc. Ebbesmeyer said sailors sometimes run into them,
sinking their boats.
Others are
worried that the ducks have disintegrated into fragments, adding to the tons of
non-biodegradable plastic that forever roams the oceans, endangering marine
life.
But Ebbesmeyer
isn’t much worried about shipwrecks or environmental disaster right now — he
just wants to know whether some of the duckies made it from the Pacific to the
Atlantic.
“We know they
were in the Bering Strait in 1994. We know some were on ice,” he said.
Ebbesmeyer has
proof of 30 drifters such as bottles and running shoes that have made the
Arctic journey to the Atlantic, and satellite-tracked buoys have been tracked
making the trip as well. Given those precedents, by 2001 the tub toys should
have been all over the North Atlantic. Ebbesmeyer is confident that by now they
should be skirting New England.
People have
contacted him with reports of duck sightings in Maine, Florida and Scotland,
but none of those toys have been sent to Ebbesmeyer for authentication. A woman
in Maine told Ebbesmeyer she is sure she found one of the ducks in July, but
she was unaware of the lost toys at the time so she did not keep it.
How to
recognize a true survivor if you come across an orphaned duck, frog, turtle or
beaver on the beach?
One of the
globe-swimming tub toys will have “First Years” and the company’s logo embossed
on it, it’ll fit in the palm of the hand and its coat will have faded
dramatically, probably appearing more white than yellow, blue, green or red.
And, of
course, it’ll be smiling.
(Home) (Boat Dives) (Buddy List) (Campouts) (Diving Links) (Dive Spots & Dive Boats) (Diving Time Line) (Email) (Meetings) (Membership) (Recipes) (Safety & Education) (News Letters AKA Snorkel Talk) (Non Sequitur) (Updates)
Posted September 2, 2003