The container ship Ever Laurel, operated by Evergreen Marine, was three days out of Hong Kong on January 10, 1992, bound across the North Pacific to the port of Tacoma, Washington, when a severe winter storm trapped the vessel near the international date line. Twelve 40-foot intermodal shipping containers slid off the deck during the storm. Eleven of them are presumed to have sunk, drifted or broken up and released their contents into the ocean without generating documented consequences. The twelfth, carrying a shipment of children’s bath toys made in China for the American company The First Years Inc., opened at some point during the incident and released 28,800 plastic ducks, beavers, turtles and frogs into the Pacific Ocean, approximately 45 degrees north latitude and 178 degrees east longitude. And the toys began, only by the direct action of the ocean currents, to drift. What made the loading of the twelfth container more significant than any of the other eleven was that the toys were physically well suited to serve as accidental scientific instruments. Unlike most children’s bath toys, they had no holes anywhere on the body for water to enter, meaning they stayed floating indefinitely rather than sinking after a few weeks in seawater. They were also identifiable to the naked eye, with four distinct animal shapes and four bright primary colors that, even after prolonged exposure to sunlight and salt water, could be recognized from a distance. And the manufacturer had produced them with “The First Years” logo embossed on the base of each toy, which meant that any confusion over the origin of a stranded duck could be resolved by turning it over. Which meant that, for the first time in the history of oceanography, a single well-defined event had released tens of thousands of floating, trackable, dated, and identical objects at a precisely known location in the open ocean. That was the accidental scientific opportunity. It was taken by two oceanographers from Seattle. What Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham did with the ducks According to the Wikipedia entry on the Friendly Floatees spill, based on Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham’s 1994 peer-reviewed article published in the journal Eos: Transactions of the American Geophysical Union and reports in The Times of London, the Financial Times, and Harper’s Magazine, the two oceanographers who first recognized the significance of the spill were Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who had spent decades studying the ocean debris as a parallel research activity, and James Ingraham, who maintained a numerical model of North Pacific ocean surface currents called OSCUR (Ocean Surface Current Simulation). The OSCUR model had been built to predict fishery movements using historical wind and air pressure data dating back to 1967. Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham realized that a mass release of 28,800 identical objects at a known point offered a scale of validation data that the model had never before had access to. The standard oceanographic technique for tracking ocean currents until that time had involved releasing 500 to 1,000 numbered glass bottles adrift at a chosen location and waiting for coastal drifters to find them, with typical recovery rates of 2 percent. Rubber ducks, if the same recovery rate were maintained, would produce approximately 600 confirmed sightings, which was more than an order of magnitude greater than any previous experiment had generated. The two scientists began a coordinated recovery campaign that lasted for the next two decades. They contacted coastal wildlife agencies, environmental groups, vagrant associations, harbor masters and Coast Guard stations around the rim of the North Pacific. They installed direct telephone lines. They published advertisements in the newspapers. They asked The First Years Inc. to offer a small monetary reward for confirmed recoveries. And they recorded every reported sighting into a database that directly fed into the OSCUR model, giving Ingraham the empirical validation he needed to refine the model’s prediction of surface current flow in the region. The first recoveries occurred ten months after the spill. On November 16, 1992, a drifter near Sitka, on the Alaska coast, recovered ten of the ducks about 3,200 kilometers east-northeast of the release point. Twelve days later, another homeless man found twenty more. By August 1993, approximately 400 Floatees had been recovered along an 850-kilometer stretch of the Gulf of Alaska coast, giving Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham the 1.4 percent Pacific recovery rate they had estimated beforehand. The OSCUR model, when validated against the actual landfall pattern in Alaska, was shown to be substantially accurate. Which meant that his predictions about the subsequent drift of the remaining ducks were probably also worth taking seriously. The routes the ducks ultimately followed Those predictions were remarkable. The OSCUR model suggested that the North Pacific subpolar gyre, which is the large counterclockwise ocean current that circulates through the Gulf of Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, the coast of Kamchatka, and back to Hawaii, would entrain many of the surviving Floaters in a multi-year circuit that would eventually deposit some of them on the coasts of Japan, back to Alaska, and then in a subset carried northward across the Strait of Bering, to the Arctic Ocean. From there, the model predicted, the ducks would freeze on the polar ice sheet, move slowly through the Arctic basin at the speed of the ice itself, and eventually reach the North Atlantic five or six years later, when currents in the Greenland Sea would free them from the melting ice. That’s where the story got really interesting. According to the detailed 2021 IFLScience report by senior science writer Rachael Funnell, drawing on Ebbesmeyer’s own published work and interviews with beach collectors involved in the recovery effort, the OSCUR model’s predictions turned out to be generally correct. Recoveries in Washington state followed in 1996. Recoveries along the coasts of Hawaii and Japan continued until the late 1990s. Ducks that had moved north through the Bering Strait were reported frozen in Arctic ice in the early 2000s, and in 2007 a small number of Floatees, discolored by fifteen years of sunlight and salt water but still Identifiable by their raised logos, they had washed up off the south-western coasts of the United Kingdom, meaning they had completed a journey of approximately 27,000 kilometers from their release point in the mid-Pacific to the beaches of Devon and Cornwall. A recovered duck, during the reconstruction of its probable route, floated directly over the site where the Titanic had sunk. The scientific importance of Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham’s data set has been substantial. His subsequent articles on the Floatees spill, along with a related analysis of an earlier spill in 1990 of 61,000 Nike running shoes from a different container ship, contributed to the empirical validation of the OSCUR model and its successor OSCURS, which is now one of the standard reference models for the prediction of North Pacific surface currents. The models are used today to forecast the drift of oil spills, the dispersion patterns of marine debris, the likely landfall locations of missing vessels, and the movement of fish larvae and juvenile marine organisms. The predictive framework that emerged from tracking rubber ducks across the ocean now underpins a substantial portion of contemporary ocean current modeling in the North Pacific. Ebbesmeyer later coined the term flotsametrics to describe the discipline of using accidental spills of identifiable objects to map the paths of ocean currents. His research program continued throughout the 2000s and 2010s, incorporating data from a wide range of subsequent container spills, and formed the basis of Donovan Hohn’s 2011 book Moby-Duck, which followed the story of the Friendly Floatees through the Pacific and Arctic. The ducks later appeared in the BBC documentary Blue Planet II. And by the time Floatee’s last confirmed recoveries were recorded in the mid-2010s, roughly two decades after the original spill, the container’s contents had produced a validated ocean current model, an accepted subfield of oceanography, a best-selling nonfiction book, and one of the most contradictory contributions to marine science of the 20th century. None of which would have happened if the container in question had gone to the bottom of the Pacific along with the eleven that presumably did so that same night. The scientific value of the spill came from the physical properties of the specific cargo carried by the twelfth container, from the recognition by two Seattle oceanographers that an accidental release of 28,800 identical beach bums was a research opportunity that no funding agency would ever knowingly authorize, and from the twenty-year commitment of a distributed international network of beach bums to record and report recoveries as the toys arrived. What began as a routine maritime incident during a winter storm in the trans-Pacific shipping lanes became, over the next two decades, one of the largest and most productive natural experiments in the history of physical oceanography. About this articleThis article is for general information and reflection. It is not professional advice. For your specific situation, consult a qualified professional. A personal measure of deep time. Look what has changed in the universe since you were born. Start with a date. 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