"Transcontinental Ducks" .. How did an incident of Evergreen change ocean science?

In January 1992, while the vessel "Ever Laurel" of the Taiwanese company "Evergreen" was making its way across the Pacific Ocean, flying from Hong Kong to the United States, it encountered severe weather conditions that caused some containers to fall off the deck.

One of those containers contained about 29,000 children's toys, including red beavers, green frogs, blue turtles and yellow ducks. These toys were designed primarily to float on the surface of the water, where they were placed with young children in bathtubs.

Traveler ducks

To this extent, the accident ends, and it is a typical accident in this area, but the Evergreen games gained wide fame when the American oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer was interested in that incident, which was later known as The Friendly Floatees.

In oceanography, one of the most complex things that scientists have tried to study is the course of currents in the ocean, and their changes with time, especially when climate change messes with them year after year.

The incident gained wide fame when the American oceanographer Curtis Ipsmayer (Richfreshman-Freshphoto) was interested in it.

At that time, the traditional methods of studying them were to release 600-1000 sealed bottles, which were tagged, into the ocean and then wait for them where they were expected, but only 10 or 20 of those bottles were reaching the shores, so the results were not accurate enough, and I needed Scientists to repeat their experiments more than once.

But with a payload of this size, it was expected that more than 500 games would appear on the beaches of separate areas of the nearby coasts. Ipsmire's team asked workers on those coasts and local residents to inform the research center, if they found the floating games.

Computer simulation

Ten months after the accident, the first games began to appear along the coast of the US state of Alaska, about 3,200 kilometers from the point of the accident, 400 games in total were found along the eastern coast of the Gulf of Alaska, the period that passed from the beginning of the accident until the end of 1993 .

Ipsmayer collaborated with James Ingram, an environmental and ocean scientist from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and they relied on a computer simulation model that used measurements of air pressure and average wind speed and direction between 1946 and 1993 to study water currents in the Pacific Ocean. Fisheries.

The Children's Floating Toy Movement from 1922 to 2007 (Nord West - Wikipedia)

Using the model they developed to study ocean currents, the two scientists predicted that more games would arrive in Washington state in the US in 1996, which has already happened, and they also predicted that after 5-6 years the games will reach the North Atlantic, which is also what has already happened. Greene on the European coasts.

A study published by Dr. Curtis Ibsamayer in the journal Advancing Earth and Space Science, dated December 13, 1994, documented the scientific findings that were based on this accident of children's games and the consequent development of ocean currents studies.