rubber ducks in ocean 1992

1996 - 2023 National Geographic Society. A consignment of Friendly Floatee toys, manufactured in China for The First Years Inc., departed from Hong Kong on a container ship, the Evergreen Ever Laurel,[1] destined for Tacoma, Washington. That crate contained over 28,000 rubber ducks, most of which are still in the ocean today. while crossing the north Pacific in 1992. Remind students that the Coriolis effect holds true for both wind and water currents. Depending on its rate of decomposition, the cargo may end up . A bumper crop of 28,800 ocean current trackers was therefore a boon for oceanography as it would likely return much more data. Washington, DC 20036, Careers| A rubber duck like the flotilla that is currently floating on the world's oceans, Credit: Image via Alexander Kaiser, pooliestudios.com, The merchant ship Evergreen Ever Laurel from which had been carrying the ducks, Blue Planet II reveals how 28,000 RUBBER DUCKS lost at sea 25 years ago are still washing ashore, Blue Planet II reveals how 28,000 RUBBER DUCKS lost at sea 25 years ago are still washing ashore around the globe today, Inside sinister rise of pink cocaine sweeping UK nightclubs as warring cartels battle to control 'Coca Cola of drugs', We live on Britain's WORST street - it's rife with drug addicts, crime & prostitutes we're terrified for our lives, Man 'naked and covered in blood' arrested before mum found 'murdered' at home as neighbours reveal hearing screams, Leicester 'explosion': Listen to massive 'sonic' boom that shook homes and rattled windows. You're giving the plight of the Laysan albatross many moments of thought. The ship was going from Hong . Inside one of those containers was a shipment of nearly 30,000 "Friendly Floatees" - better known as rubber ducks. Fun365. A 2011 survey by the World Shipping Council estimated that an average of 675 containers were lost at sea each year between 2008-10. 2.9k. JAN DERICK CARPIO - Lab #25-26_ Rubber Duck Ocean Currents and Coastal Climate Factors.docx. Most of the rows of containers had toppled like dominoes. Subscribe today for ourWeekly Newsletterin your inbox! "When I first heard the phrase 'garbage patch,' I imagined something dense," he says. In 1997, Clarion Books published Ducky (.mw-parser-output cite.citation{font-style:inherit;word-wrap:break-word}.mw-parser-output .citation q{quotes:"\"""\"""'""'"}.mw-parser-output .citation:target{background-color:rgba(0,127,255,0.133)}.mw-parser-output .id-lock-free a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-free a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Lock-green.svg")right 0.1em center/9px no-repeat}.mw-parser-output .id-lock-limited a,.mw-parser-output .id-lock-registration a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-limited a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-registration a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Lock-gray-alt-2.svg")right 0.1em center/9px no-repeat}.mw-parser-output .id-lock-subscription a,.mw-parser-output .citation .cs1-lock-subscription a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Lock-red-alt-2.svg")right 0.1em center/9px no-repeat}.mw-parser-output .cs1-ws-icon a{background:url("//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Wikisource-logo.svg")right 0.1em center/12px no-repeat}.mw-parser-output .cs1-code{color:inherit;background:inherit;border:none;padding:inherit}.mw-parser-output .cs1-hidden-error{display:none;color:#d33}.mw-parser-output .cs1-visible-error{color:#d33}.mw-parser-output .cs1-maint{display:none;color:#3a3;margin-left:0.3em}.mw-parser-output .cs1-format{font-size:95%}.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-left{padding-left:0.2em}.mw-parser-output .cs1-kern-right{padding-right:0.2em}.mw-parser-output .citation .mw-selflink{font-weight:inherit}ISBN0-395-75185-3), written by Eve Bunting and illustrated by Caldecott Medal winner David Wisniewski. These patterns are not perfect, and the path of the Friendly Floatees has shown us that we still have a lot to learn about ocean currents. Post date: Mar 23, 2015 3:35:59 PM. There you are, listening to the stacked containers strain against their lashings, creaking and groaning and cataracting with every roll, and with every roll you are wondering what in the name of Neptune it would take to make stacks of steel or for that matter aluminum-containers fall. The academic Called convergence zones or "garbage patches," these parts of the ocean contain trash, plastic and toys whatever happens to get sucked in while floating past. To inquire about a licence to reproduce material, visit our Syndication site. By the early 2000s, a few had even been found as far away as Maine and the British Isles. Related Products. At least one of the containers burst open, spilling several dozen cardboard boxes containing approximately 29,000 bath toys into the ocean. Newsroom| What does exist is a whole lot of plastic out there, but it's spread out over millions of miles of ocean. Years later, another crop again graced the shares of Alaska. News Group Newspapers Limited in England No. Sir David Attenborough was telling a story about 7,000 rubber ducks in the sea . . Wade in a little too far and they can carry you away. There are certain parts of the ocean where currents converge and spiral inward, collecting what's floating on the surface, Hohn says. 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A Closer Look At Phthalates. Hurricane-force winds and waves thirty-six feet tall rocked the 28,900-ton ship from side to side. The turtles and frogs still have their original colors. In 1992, approximately 29000 rubber duckies fell off a cargo ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. . Oceanographers and marine scientists were quick to recognize the potential of 28,000 rubber bath toys-turned-flotsam (floating trash). I loved the part about containers falling off a ship, the part about the oceanographers tracking the castaways with the help of far-flung beachcombers. . Emphasize to students that while models are useful, they are also theoretical. Includes: - 5E Lesson Plan - Student Handouts - Interactive Website for Data table. : A True Story of Plastic in Our Oceans, by Markus Motum, (Sept. 2021, Candlewick Press), $17.99, ISBN: 9781536217728 Ages 7-10. What was the approximate average speed of the ocean current that carried the; Question: Rubber Ducks A severe storm on January 10, 1992, caused a cargo ship near the Aleutian Islands to spill 29,000 rubber ducks and other . The Friendly Floatees, as they were called, first began to wash up on the Alaskan coast towards the end of 1992, approximately 3,200 kilometers (2,000 miles) from their point of origin. Blue Planet II in new fakery storm after film crew admit planting rubber ducks in ocean supposedly from 1992 ship. The ducks - along with other bathtub toys like beavers, turtles and frogs - fell overboard from a container ship en route from China to Seattle during a storm in 1992. 61,000 Nike running shoes that had been lost overboard in 1990, Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them, "What connects the 'Ever Given', the Suez Canal and 7,200 rubber ducks loose in the Pacific? Amidst the rocking and tossing of the waves, several shipping containers fell overboard, spilling their contents into the sea. Some containers were just missing swept overboard. Then, another bunch washed up on the shores of Shemya Island, AK, 3,200 miles from the spill site. Ocean science has come on leaps and bounds since the charismatic quartet first began their journey. In 1992, a cargo ship container tumbled into the North Pacific, dumping 28,000 rubber ducks and other bath toys that were headed from China to the U.S. Currents took them, and news reports said some may have eventually reached Maine and other shores on the Atlantic. "But while I was out there with them, toys were found. Rubber ducks were invented in the late 1800s when it became possible to more easily shape rubber, and are believed to improve developmental skills in children during water play. The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. The landfalls were logged in Ingraham's computer model OSCUR (Ocean Surface Currents Simulation), which uses measurements of air pressure from 1967 onwards to calculate the direction of and speed of wind across the oceans, and the consequent surface currents. He is a features editor at GQ. As ducks were discovered on shores, beachcombers reported their location to oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who, in turn, plugged them into Ocean Surface Currents Simulation (OSCAR) software. It's snowing. Objet d' Art: In 2007, Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman created the world's largest rubber duck, measuring 16.5-by-20-by-32 meters . When empirical results disagree with a model, the model is updated. 18,000 toys move south washing up in Indonesia, Australia and South America Nov 1992 Ducks begin landing on the . For further details of our complaints policy and to make a complaint please click this link: thesun.co.uk/editorial-complaints/, This new map illustrates how the ducks went on to rule the high seas. But that's the thing about strong currents: there's no swimming against them. [Directed by Cabong Studios, narrated by Addison . First, students predict where the ducks landed. In 1992, a cargo ship container tumbled into the North Pacific, dumping 28,000 rubber ducks and other bath toys that were headed from China to the U.S. Currents took them, and news reports said some may have eventually reached Maine and other shores on the Atlantic. They will best know the preferred format. Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham is expected to have many such opportunities to study ocean currents in future. Nor did I know or care that such toxins are surprisingly abundant at the ocean's surface, or that they bioaccumulate as they move up the food chain. Between July and December 2003, The First Years Inc. offered a $100 US savings bond reward to anybody who recovered a Floatee in New England, Canada or Iceland. Or to ride a high-speed ferry through the smoggy, industrial backwaters of China's Pearl River Delta, where, inside the Po Sing plastic factory, I would witness yellow pellets of polyethylene resin transmogrify into icons of childhood. Clickheretouploadyours. In 1992, a cargo ship spilled 29,000 bath toys, including rubber ducks, into the North Pacific, leaving the ducks at the mercy of the ocean. On the left side of the screen, you should now see the. In this activity, students follow the path of the Friendly Floatees, a shipment of 29,000 rubber ducks that spilled overboard in 1992. Analyze data from a rubber ducky spill to learn how the distribution of plastic pollution in the ocean relates to ocean currents. Kurtis Pykes. Or you're spending three days and nights in a shabby hotel room in Pusan, South Korea, waiting for your ship to come in, and you're wondering what you could possibly have been thinking when you embarked on this harebrained journey, this wild duckie chase, and you're drinking Scotch, and looking sentimentally at photos of your wife and son on your laptop, your wife and son who, on the other side of the planet, on the far side of the international date line, are doing and feeling and drinking God knows what. The ducks are currently being used to track ice-melt rates and ocean-current patterns in the North Atlantic. On a stormy January night in 1992, out in the Pacific Ocean, 29,000 plastic yellow ducks, blue turtles and green frogs fell from a cargo ship and were lost at sea. In 1992, a cargo ship container tumbled into the North Pacific, dumping 28,000 rubber ducks and other bath toys that were headed from China to the U.S. Currents took them. The harbinger of these changes is a misleadingly innocent symbol: the rubber duck. Once you have ensured that all tops are correctly assembled, tell students to complete the mini-lab according to the directions on the sheet, answering the questions as they work. A strange thing happened today in 1992: the Pacific Ocean filled up with rubber duckies. . Thousands of Friendly Floatees are assumed to be still lost at sea, with many of them presumably floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patchthe subject of the next activity. However, still, more of these toys were predicted to have headed eastward past Greenland and make landfall on the southwestern shores of the United Kingdom in 2007. A consignment of thousands of rubber ducks is expected to wash up any day on the coast of New England - after more than a decade at sea. (NordNordWest via Wikimedia . 1145 17th Street NW On January 10, 1992, a storm at sea in the Pacific set in motion one of the largest and most unusual studies into global ocean currents. Learn about how they managed to bring international attention to the danger of cargo pollution. Beth Chimera/Viking Adult Like plastics, synthetic rubber does not biodegrade, and though recycling rubber is possible, it is not always easy. STARRED REVIEW * "Carle takes an actual incident, when numerous bathtub toys fell off a . This lists the logos of programs or partners of, NASA Ocean Motion: Curt Ebbesmeyer Profile, National Geographic: The Global Conveyor Belt, National Geographic: Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Polymer Science Learning Center: All About Elastomers. Apply knowledge of current patterns to predict the destinations of floating rubber ducks. Thousands fell into the sea in 1992 when a container ship bound for Seattle from China shed its load in a storm in the Pacific Ocean. It is carried off by the ocean and may end up crisscrossing the globe. CNN . We pay forvideostoo. "And all this I would do, I hoped, without leaving my desk.". In 1992, a shipping barge headed from China to the U.S. encountered a major storm in the Pacific Ocean. In early January 1992, the container ship Evergreen Ever Laurel departed Hong Kong for Washington. (Answer: Explain that this phenomenon is known as the Coriolis effect, which students will explore through a mini-lab to see how it works. The water is deep and black, and so is the sky. "We know that in the marine food web, there is an alarmingly elevated contaminant burden in species at the top of the food web," he says. Scientists could never ethically dump tens of thousands of plastic toys into the ocean, but the accidental release of so many toys represented an opportunity too fortuitous to miss out on. Posted by 8 years ago. Use these resources after students have developed their Ocean Plastics Movement Model to provide more information about the story of the Friendly Floatees and what they teach us about ocean currents. Ask what other factors might affect debris as small as a rubber duck or a piece of plastic. Ten months later hundreds of rubber ducks began to appear along the shoreline near Sitka, Alaska, roughly 1600 miles away. A shipping container filled with rubber duckies was lost at sea in 1992, and the bath toys are still washing ashore. hide caption. 2. an area of ocean that slowly rotates in an enormous circle. Image by NordNordWest/Wikimedia Commons. In 1992 nearly 30,000 rubber ducks escaped into the ocean. In 1992, three containers full of rubber ducks fell off a cargo ship in the Pacific Ocean. Students use maps to learn about ocean currents, research case studies of ocean spills, and discuss the role of oceanographers. The years following the number of these floatees visiting beaches increased manifold. He is a features editor at GQ. This is evidenced by the fact that the ducks started washing up all around the world over the next three to five years! (Jose Gil/iStockphoto.com) In 1992, a cargo ship container . Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham contacted beachcombers, coastal workers, and local residents to locate hundreds of the beached Floatees over a 850 kilometres (530mi) shoreline. They weren't supposed to go into the ocean. The first recorded crop of Friendly Floatees washed up just nine months later on the shores of Sitka, AKroughly 2,200 miles from where they were deposited into the ocean. Some of the toys landed along Pacific Ocean shores, such as Hawaii. You're wishing you'd never given Big Poppa the chance to write about Luck Duck, because if you hadn't you'd never have heard the fable of the rubber ducks lost at sea. CART. And, like any book about . More info on the ducks here. Friendly Floatees are plastic bath toys (including rubber ducks) marketed by The First Years and made famous by the work of Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer who models ocean currents on the basis of flotsam movements. In this activity, students follow the path of the Friendly Floatees, a shipment of 29,000 rubber ducks that spilled overboard in 1992. Some of the toys landed along Pacific Ocean shores, like Hawaii. All Rights Reserved. If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media. Friendly Floatees are plastic bath toys (including rubber ducks) marketed by The First Years and made famous by the work of Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer who models ocean currents on the basis of flotsam movements. Among them was a shipment of 28,000 plastic rubber ducks and other bath toys. The next thing you know years have passed, and you're still adrift, still waiting to see where the questions take you. Alaska, Hawaii and Japan have all enjoyed the thrill of finding rubber ducks, too. Find rubber ducks and bulk rubber ducks at the lowest price guaranteed. ", "There are people who do beachcombing for different reasons, but there's a community a bit like avid bird-watchers for whom it is more than just a pleasurable recreational thing to do when you go to the seashore. With Bernadette Peters. 6. ", On the worst shipping container disaster in modern history, "[A ship named APL China] was traveling from Far East to the Pacific Northwest [in 1998] and it lost 407 containers overboard in a single night [after a possible typhoon]. Drift bottles have been used to study ocean currents, but their deployment is normally capped at 1,000 bottles, many of which may never be seen again. Explore how the currents that make up the five major ocean gyres carry plastic around the world and concentrate it into areas of floating trash commonly referred to as garbage patches.. Seattle oceanographers Curtis Ebbesmeyer and James Ingraham, who were working on an ocean surface current model, began to track their progress. Accidental drifters are not limited to shoes. First, students predict where the ducks landed. Or, it might be a rubber duck from one of the largest unintended ocean current studies of all time. At first, this was simply seen as a small financial loss. "What role plastic plays in that is an ongoing area of study. You want to know what it's like inside the toy factories of Guangdong. At the outset, I felt no need to acquaint myself with the six degrees of freedom. At some point, the container opened (possibly because it collided with other containers or the ship itself) and the Floatees were released. However, a few of these ducks made their way to the coast of Alaska, where they were found by . The forces included in this model are large and global in scale. In fact, due to the nature of where they were cast into the ocean, many also split off into the Subtropical Gyrea gyre with a huge circular pattern that touches the equator and intersects other gyres. A journalist on an ocean quest for 28,800 rubber ducks lost at sea discovers where they came from, where they drifted, and why. I liked my job and loved my wife and was inclined to agree with Emerson that travel is a fool's paradise. Hurricane-force winds and waves thirty-six feet tall rocked the 28,900-ton ship from side to side. In May 2007 the rubber duck story ran in UK newspapers. How long have Keir Starmer and Sue Gray been secretly cooking up their plot? Those Lego pieces have drifted some 62,000 miles since then. Students use data to figure out which ocean currents the ducks may have traveled, and how long it took them to reach certain destinations. 10 Little Rubber Ducks fall overboard and land on shores all around the world. In 2011, Donovan Hohn published Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them (Viking, ISBN978-0-670-02219-9)[7], On 20 June 2014, The Disney Channel and Disney Junior aired Lucky Duck, a Canadian-American animated TV movie that is loosely based on and inspired by the Friendly Floatees.[8]. But here was 29,000 pieces of easily recognizable plastic, drifting about in the ocean and all released from a single spot. The jolly characters burst forth from their shipping container, possibly due to its doors being opened by a collision with one of the other lost containers. You'd inhale the ocean and go down, alone. 15 Jan 2022, 22:02 UTC By: Sebastian Toma. The small, plastic adventurers were accidentally dumped into the ocean in January 1992. On January 10, 1992, a container ship "Evergreen Ever Laurel" cruising from Hong Kong to Tacoma, Washington, encountered a storm in the Northern Pacific Ocean, bringing down 12 containers into the icy waters below. Ducks' odyssey nears end. Their story has been popularized for both adult and youth audiences, notably with the books Moby-Duck (Hohn 2011) 1 and 10 Little Rubber Ducks (Carle 2005). A severe storm on January 10, 1992, near the Aleutian Islands, caused a cargo ship to spill 29,000 rubber ducks and other bath toys into the ocean. Amidst the rocking and tossing of the waves, several shipping containers fell overboard, spilling their contents into the sea. 16 . Rachael is a writer and digital content producer at IFLScience with a Zoology degree from the University of Southampton, UK, and a nose for novelty animal stories. the result of Earth's rotation on weather patterns and ocean currents. Among the millions of things that Ever Laurel was carrying was a consignment of plastic childrens bath toys manufactured in China for the Japanese toy company The First Years Inc. Four days later, on 10 January 1992, the freighter ran into a storm in the North Pacific. As the map below shows, the colorful toys . If you're ever out in the ocean, you might just run into a rubber ducky. (Answer: clockwise). Attend a rubber duck race. Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. In the decades since, rubber ducks have washed up on beaches around the world and given scientists clues about ocean currents. National Geographic Society is a 501 (c)(3) organization. The standard method of tracking ocean currents is to release drift bottle, five hundred to one thousand at a time, and chart their movement. Your ears ache, your fingers are numb. Read: Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search . By 2007, bleached white by their journey but some still sporting The First Years branding that identified them, a small number began washing up on the south-western shores of the UK. FOR these rubber duckies the worlds oceans have been their epic bathtub after they were washed overboard and released into the high sea 25 years ago. And while its impossible to ever account for them all, the Friendly Floatees we do have can tell us a lot about ocean currents. Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn. More of the toys were recovered in 2004 than in any of the preceding three years. What happened to them is the subject of Donovan Hohn's book Moby-Duck. In the 1930s, these rubber toys began to take their place in bathrooms. 1" on the floating duck phenomenon, citing the maritime accident that released the ducks into the sea", Keith C. Heidorn, 'Of Shoes And Ships And Rubber Ducks And A Message In A Bottle', Jane Standley, 'Ducks' odyssey nears end', 'How Nikes, toys and hockey gear help ocean science', "Moby-Duck: Or, The Synthetic Wilderness of Childhood,", Moby Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Friendly_Floatees_spill&oldid=1137083065, This page was last edited on 2 February 2023, at 18:26. Jose Gil/iStockphoto.com This is where they made landfall. Rubber Duckies help to Study Ocean Currents. Pacific Ocean; In general, additives in synthetic rubbers make them more flexible and stretchable at room temperature, while some other plastics tend to be harder and more brittle. The less than favorable maneuver saw several shipping containers unceremoniously dumped into the waters, one of which contained a consignment of 28,800 bath toys. Exact date yellow weather warning for snow and ice forecast to hit UK - will you be affected? "When I set out following these toys, I didn't expect it to turn into an environmental story, but I very quickly learned that unlike the flotsam of ages past, the flotsam of today much of it plastic persists," he says. One container was carrying bath toys comprising rubber ducks, turtles, beavers, and frogs. Contact Us. Hans Christian Andersen Award winner Eric Carle wrote 10 Little Rubber Ducks (Harper Collins 2005, ISBN978-0-00-720242-3).[6]. OSCAR successfully predicted the direction of the Friendly Floatees, which arrived in Washington state a couple of years later. Ask students to predict, based on what they know about the movement of plastic in oceans, where these 29,000 ducks would end up. When you reach out to them, you will need the page title, URL, and the date you accessed the resource. Toys, Games & Novelties; Novelty Toys; A duck, frog, beaver, and turtle taught oceanographers about the connectedness of our seas. The varied journeys of the bath toys taught oceanographers a lot about the connectedness of our seas. They moved slowly with the ice across the Pole taking five to six years until they reached the North Atlantic. This ship came in and it looked ravaged. The spill was referenced in a 2022 game "Placid Plastic Duck Simulator" as an "accidental duck experiment", which can be heard on the radio in between music. Get two months of Skillshare Premium for 99 cents by being one of the first 1,000 people to sign up at http://skl.sh/hai8Get a Half as Interesting t-shirt: h. The ducks fell off a cargo ship into the Pacific Ocean in 1992. [For them] it's a hobby and a hunt. Show a rubber duck, which may be made of rubber or plastic. Using the models they had developed, the oceanographers correctly predicted further landfalls of the toys in Washington state in 1996 and theorized that many of the remaining Floatees would have traveled to Alaska, westward to Japan, back to Alaska, and then drifted northwards through the Bering Strait and become trapped in the Arctic pack ice. He details the journey via plane, foot and container ship in Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. Certainly I never expected to transit the Northwest Passage aboard a Canadian icebreaker in the company of scientists investigating the Arctic's changing climate and polar bears lunching on seals. In 2011, he published the song as a YouTube video, Yellow Rubber Ducks. Amusing Planet, 2022. What's In My Plastic? Now funded by NASA, Ebbesmeyer and Ingrahams model, called Ocean Surface Currents Simulation (OSCURS), has many practical applications aside from predicting the movement of flotsam, such as helping fishing vessels navigate and locate shoals of fish. Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service. © 2023 IFLScience. In the middle of a raging storm in 1992, a cargo ship carrying a huge assortment of vinyl toys tipped over. The rubber ducks first began to appear in November 1992 along the Alaskan Coast, more than 3,000 kms away from its point of origin. Nevertheless, there you are, not a goner yet, gazing up at the shipping containers stacked six-high overhead, and from them cataracts of snowmelt and rain are spattering on your head. Teacher Note . When a container of bath toys, including yellow rubber ducks, fell into the Pacific Ocean in January 1992, it allowed scientists such as Curtis Ebbesmeyer to . It's now 27 years after the shipping container fell overboard and scientist have used the rubber ducks as a way to study ocean currents and the impact that ocean trash has.

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