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Thousands of Rubber Ducks to Finally End Journey
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.'"
I think I've just come up with a new money making scheme!
1) Goto shop and purchase large amounts of rubber duckies
2) Emerse them in water and ice for a few years and so
3) Sell them to this company for 50 pounds each
4) Profit!
More seriously, maybe scientists should be getting more brightly coloured floating objects and chucking them in the sea at various points. What about red for Russia (two types, one for each coast), yellow for (no I won't go there...) and various other colours for other countries.
A great way to learn more about ocean currents.
But they would get into trouble with (some) environmentalists, maybe they need to just "accidentally" knock a few more crates overboard?
I wank in the shower.
Looks like a story tailor-made for a pixar movie. Sort of like a toy-story / finding-nemo mashup. -satyakam
duck duck duck duck duck duck duck ...
What a bunch of quacks...
It's a pretty cool story though (shock, someone actually read TFA). I'm sure that we've learned a lot more about oceanic patterns from those plastic toys than we have from a lot of other (more expensive) methods employed in the past.
Thousands washing up at 50 pounds a pop for returning them?
1. Train ticket to West Country
2. Beach scavenge
3. Profit!!
This will be more fun than when the Napoli beached off Branscombe! Easier to sneak plastic ducks off the beach than BMW motorbikes....
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
As a native of the South-West of England I for one welcome our new faded yellow Chinese rubber duck overlords.
Harper's did a long article on these in the January 2007 issue. If you're a subscriber, you can go to http://harpers.org/archive/2007/01/0081345 to read it.
Also, if you're interested in this stuff, you might want to check out Ebbesmeyer's website and newsletter about beachcombing: http://beachcombersalert.org/
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
Wanna bet there's some collector paying more than those 50 pounds on EBay? If I found one, that's where it would end up.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
(From Sesame Street) Rubber Ducky, you're the one, You make bathtime lots of fun, Rubber Ducky, I'm awfully fond of you; Woo woo be doo Rubber Ducky, joy of joys, When I squeeze you, you make noise! Rubber Ducky, you're my very best friend, it's true! Doo doo doo doo, doo doo Every day when I Make my way to the tubby I find a little fella who's Cute and yellow and chubby Rub-a-dub-a-dubby! Rubber Ducky, you're so fine And I'm lucky that you're mine Rubber ducky, I'm awfully fond of you. Every day when I Make my way to the tubby I find a little fella who's Cute and yellow and chubby Rubber Ducky, you're so fine And I'm lucky that you're mine Rubber ducky, I'm awfully fond of - Rubber ducky, I'd like a whole pond of - Rubber ducky I'm awfully fond of you! Doo doo, be doo
Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer - that's quite a good name for someone who works with the sea.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Why in Chtlus name a link to the daily mail? I got sick from all the pictures of bikini clad babes that were supposedly famous (oh! she broke her leg while doing house chores) FCS dress up or take it all off (&make that porn movie)....
6 8-uk-on-alert-for-plastic-duck-invasion.html
So here is the link to a more sensible website:
http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn121
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Nike got there first with shoes that had serial numbers to allow tracking across the globe.
In late May of 1990, the container vessel Hansa Carrier encountered a severe storm in the north Pacific Ocean (~48N, 161W) on its passage from Korea to the United States. During the storm, a large wave washed twenty-one shipping containers overboard. Five of these 20-metre containers held a shipment of approximately 80,000 Nike shoes ranging from children's shoes to large hiking boots. It has been estimated that four of the five containers opened into the stormy waters, releasing over 60,000 shoes into the north Pacific Ocean.
Life is just a bowl of All Bran - Small Faces
Yes, replacing the Council with faded yellow Chinese rubber ducks might actually be an improvement.
Pining for the fjords
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Looking forward to the iDuck combined mobile phone and ducky on eBay - no-doubt someone would buy it.
AT&ROFLMAO
Or, let's put the question in another perspective : Given the fact that we aren't perfectly sure how to predict climate and that rubber duckies still have something to teach us, will you take the risk to continue dumping into the atmosphere massive amount of CO2 - that wasn't there before in a recent time-scale ?
Are you ready to gamble that we won't encounter any problem ?
Isn't it best to decide that, because we can't be 100% sure, let's be on the safe side and avoid introducing perturbation in a model that we don't fully understand.
Remaking world economy on unsure data may seem unreasonable to you.
Avoiding to introduce perturbation in the climate that we may not perfectly understand seem a perfectly reasonable decision. If you don't understand it, don't touch it.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Do you have other facts to share? ;p
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
You were a great band, Journey! Who could have known that you would be mobbed and killed by thousands of rubber ducks!?!? What did you do to deserve this fate?!?
hackshop.com - My tech hobby project hub
Imagine if you could create Asbestos Ducks that you'd drop into a subduction zone to trace the earth's magma currents.
Of course, you'd have to wait a bit longer than 4 years for them to pop up at their destination...
Chip H.
And even if it was "carefully" dumped the problem is that we don't stop after getting it nice and diluted. We keep dumping a large quantity of carefully diluted pollutants into an extremely low energy ecosystem. In addition of sources of energy into a low energy ecosystem causes an extreme change in that ecosystem.
Oh, and if you 'carefully dilute' something into the ocean by what process do you propose that you keep it from becoming undiluted? Life forms are the most efficient way to aggregate dilute substances.
Actually this is one of the dumbest, "If I can't see anything it must not be happening" suggestions I have ever heard.
THINK! Did it work for landfills? 'But we did such a good job of hiding it under the dirt and I can't see it there!' (Of course my well is contaminated now and I have to pipe water in...)
Untreated sewage (as long as it's just that, and doesn't contain non-biologically-generated crap...) is NOT bad for the environment.
It may create local conditions that are unpleasant or even unhealthy for humans, but that's not the same as "bad for the environment". Lots of things that are perfectly natural are unpleasant or even downright deadly, and the presence of mass of fecal matter is no exception.
Where do you think all the fish in the sea go to shit? Ever wonder how lions find that herd of millions of wildebeests and zebras?
Wow, old habits die hard. GOTO? How about: ...
10 LET STEP1$ = "Go to shop and purchase large amounts of rubber duckies
20 LET STEP2$ = "Emerse them in water and ice for a few years and so"
30 LET STEP3$ = "Sell them to this company for 50 pounds each"
40 GOTO 1000
1000 REM Profit Routine
1010
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
You'd think you could spot tens of thousands of brightly colored rubber ducks on Google Earth/Maps, ya think? Anyone have links?
When a big pile of rubber ducks floating around on the ocean can give oceanographers compelling new insights into how the earth works, and add a lot on top of modern instruments as quoted here, I am somewhat uncomfortable remaking world economic order on the basis of forecasts made on that data.
Thank you AC for pointing out that people who don't know what they are talking about should be ignored. Just because there are not a lot of blinking lights does not mean that you're collecting bad data. I think / feel / guess / hope / pray / have a vested interest (remaking world economic order) / etc should be ignored because they don't provide high quality quantitative data like thousands of rubber ducks in the ocean.
PS: How would you suggest building a better system? What is a better instrument for studding ocean currents (on the surface over time) than 10,000+ floating objects dropped from a specific point? Now we could make some floats with GPS etc but most electronics are not going to survive 17 years in the ocean and people are not going to notice big rubber balls so the classic duck is basically the prefect design for such an experiment because people will notice them and report large numbers of ducks suddenly showing up. Now we might want to have more drop sites but the novelty promotes people reporting as soon as the ducks show up so increasing the number of drops lowers the quality of the data.
Wrong thread?
We're in duck mode here.
AT&ROFLMAO
There was a radio documentary about them in 2006 - my page about the programme, http://www.radiolistings.co.uk/programmes/invasion _of_the_yellow_ducks.html/, has a link to the "Listen Again" where you may be able to hear it (the BBC sometimes keeps the old factual programmes available).