Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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?
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
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
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...)
Q. Where do you think all the fish in the sea go to shit?
A. The water closet!