UK on alert for plastic duck invasion - earth - 02 July 2007 - New Scientist Environment

UK on alert for plastic duck invasion - earth - 02 July 2007 - New Scientist Environment:

Look out Britain! Here come the plastic ducks... What's left of 28,800 plastic bath toys that were lost at sea 15 years ago are headed for the western shores of the UK, according to a retired oceanographer who has been tracking them since the beginning of their epic voyage.

Curtis Ebbesmeyer had been looking for a way to test a computer model of ocean circulation – OSCURS – developed by his colleague, Jim Ingraham at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

He knew he had come across a rare opportunity to do just that when he heard that the plastic toys – ducks, frogs, beavers and turtles – had fallen off a cargo container in the north-western Pacific on 10 January 1992.

Since then, thousands of the durable, waterproof toys – many bleached and battered by their maritime travels – have been picked up on beaches around the Pacific. Using OSCURS, Ebbesmeyer has predicted their itinerary and each new sighting serves to confirm the model.

Atlantic bound

According to OSCURS, having circumvented the Pacific clockwise, some of the toys will be bound for the Artic Ocean, travelling over the North Pole and down along the US Eastern Seaboard.

"We are getting reports of ducks being washed up on America's eastern seaboard," said Ebbesmeyer on 26 June. "It is now inevitable that they will get caught up in the Atlantic currents and will turn up on English beaches."

He says Cornwall and southwest England "will probably get the first wave of them."

It is not the first time the bath toys have travelled this far. According to Ebbesmeyer's website Beachcombers' Alert, a duck arrived in Maine, US, in July 2003, and a frog made it to Scotland in August 2003.

Decades adrift

In January 2007, Ebbesmeyer and his colleagues published a summary of their flotsam-tracking since 1992 (EOS Transactions American Geophysical Union, vol 88, p 1). "How long might the toys continue orbiting?" they wrote. "A message in a bottle released in 1975 in the Gulf of Alaska recently was recovered near Prince William Sound on the south coast of Alaska."

The team say that the bottle's 31-year drift suggests that it circled the northern Pacific 10 times. The plastic toys that have stayed in the Pacific, they add, could complete 10 orbits by 2022.

Most of the toys have faded to white by now, and they are stamped with the brand-name: "The First Years". If you find one, you can help Curtis Ebbesmeyer in his research by emailing him.