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Thousands of Rubber Ducks to Finally End Journey

Posted by Zonk on from the born-free-as-free-as-the-wind-blows dept.

Bert de Jong writes "The Daily Mail reports that thousands of rubber ducks who have traveled the seas of the world since 1992 are about to end their journey. After escaping out of a container fallen off a Chinese freight ship in a storm, scientists have been followed them on their fifteen year trek. This has turned out to be an invaluable source of information for studying ocean currents. Now it seems inevitable though that they will finally land on the shores of South-West England. '[Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer] correctly predicted what many thought was impossible - that thousands of them would end up washed into the Arctic ice near Alaska, and then move at a mile a day, frozen in the pack ice, around their very own North-West Passage to the Atlantic. It proved true years later and in 2003, the first Friendly Floatees were found, frozen and then thawed out, on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. and Canada. So precious to science are they that the US firm that made them is offering a £50 bounty for finding one.'"

4 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. this will eventually turn into a pixar movie. by satyakam · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Looks like a story tailor-made for a pixar movie. Sort of like a toy-story / finding-nemo mashup. -satyakam

  2. This is actually interesting... by Flying+pig · · Score: 5, Interesting
    and amazing that it got a reasonable and sensible write up in the Daily Mail. Perhaps now Mr. Blair has departed the Mail will be less of a feral beast (that's a UK reference for those of you in the rest of the world, don't worry about it) and more of a newspaper.

    However, given the way the climate change deniers have been trying to rubbish oceanographers and meteorologists because of their agreement on inconvenient data, the fact that this guy predicted something as counter intuitive as the ducks traveling through a North-west passage in pack ice should give pause for thought.

    When even people like Dyson try and rubbish climatologists (presumably because he wants unrestricted space travel and they are warning that this is impossible without doing severe damage to the Earth) this sort of thing reminds us of just (1) how much these people know and (2) what a lot they still want to learn, while their opponents seem to rely on soundbites and dodgy statistics rather than science.

    --
    Pining for the fjords
    1. Re:This is actually interesting... by WIAKywbfatw · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The most frightening thing about the Daily Mail (well, frightening to anybody with a social conscience) is that over half their online readership is from outside the UK. Talk about giving everybody the worst possible guide of everyday British life...

      --

      "Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
  3. Re:Harper's article on the floatees by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I prefer The Register's version myself for its ransacking of thesauri, plus that's one of the best URLs I've seen in a while:
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/28/doomed_duc ks_sail_oceans_for_all_eternity