Duluth News-Tribune (MN) September 1, 2003 Section: p1 The World Is Their Bathtub –

1. Duluth News-Tribune (MN) September 1, 2003 Section: p1 The World Is Their Bathtub – Rubber Duckies Asea for a Decade ODD DUCKS: Scientists are using the wayward bath toys to gain important insight into the ocean's surface currents. VINCENT P. BZDEK, Washington Post 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 probably 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 there. 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 or Canada or on Iceland earns a $100 U.S. savings bond from 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.

2. "We've had quite a few false sightings.... Apparently, quite a few children bring rubber duckies to the beach during the summer," she said. An authenticated duck 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. 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. 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 1993-94, 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.

3. 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 nonbiodegradable 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. 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.