The ducks are in the garage
In January 1992 a container ship out of Hong Kong hit a storm in the North Pacific and lost part of its deck cargo. One container held about 28,000 plastic bath toys. Ducks, but also beavers, frogs and turtles, though it's the ducks everyone remembers. They spent the next several years arriving on beaches around the Gulf of Alaska.
Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Jim Ingraham, two oceanographers, saw what they had. A drift study normally means releasing a few hundred bottles and hoping some come back. Here were thousands of identical buoyant objects with a known release point, a known date, and a network of beachcombers reporting landfalls for free. Every duck on a beach was a data point with a timestamp, and they used them to refine a model of wind-driven surface currents.
Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer and the floating ducks
The ducks were never the discovery. They were tracers. The...
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