Where is… duckie invasion redux

from

• http://www.boingboing.net/2007/04/30/using_floating_junk_.html
• Boing-boing

an update on our | Where is… duckie invasion |

… Fifteen years, ago a shipping container fell off a boat crossing the Pacific, spilling tens of thousands of rubber duckies, turtles, and other bath toys.

from Science News:
Recently, (retired oceanographer Curtis) Ebbesmeyer and his colleagues used almost a century of data from such floating objects to map the gyre’s major subcurrents and swirls…

Even today, additional members of the tub-toy armada occasionally make landfall. The date and place of each of the nearly 1,000 toys recovered to date provide a data point, says Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a retired oceanographer in Seattle. Some of the toys are well traveled indeed—one frog washed ashore in Scotland, and a duck turned up near Maine. [...]

The article is interesting to read the explanation as to why rubber duckies and Nike shoes are better scientific measurement tools than the high-tech ones.

• http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20070428/bob9.asp

Science News is a very worthwhile weekly publication, although expensive. It makes scientific discoveries accessible to the general reader, without compromising quality. I highly recommend it.

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