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Thousands of Rubber Ducks to Finally End Journey

Posted by Zonk on Mon Jul 02, 2007 05:10 AM
from the born-free-as-free-as-the-wind-blows dept.
Toys Science
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.'"
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[+] News: Rubber Duckies For Global Warming Research 167 comments
The Wall Street Journal has a look at global warming research using rubber duckies. The toys have been employed in tracking ocean currents since 1992; but recently NASA robotics expert Alberto Behar released 90 yellow rubber ducks into the melt water flowing down a chasm in a Greenland glacier. "Each duck was imprinted with an email address and, in three languages, the offer of a reward. If all goes well, Dr. Behar hopes that one day they will emerge 30 miles or so away at the glacier's edge in the open water of Disko Bay near Ilulissat, bobbing brightly amid the icebergs north of the Arctic Circle, each one a significant clue to just how warming temperatures may speed the glacier's slide to the sea."
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Thousands of Rubber Ducks to Finally End Journey 25 Comments More /

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  • 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?

    • But they would get into trouble with (some) environmentalists, maybe they need to just "accidentally" knock a few more crates overboard?
      Only the completely stupid ones. As far as I'm concerned you can pour as many chemically inert (well, Ok - relatively inert) plastic ducks as are needed into where ever they are required. It's the untreated sewage/industrial waste that I object to (and plastic bags because they look like jellyfish to whales and leatherback turtles).

          • Taking a blind dump? (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Gription (1006467) on Monday July 02 2007, @09:29AM (#19716375)
            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...)

  • this will eventually turn into a pixar movie. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by satyakam (671269) on Monday July 02 2007, @05:20AM (#19714955)
    Looks like a story tailor-made for a pixar movie. Sort of like a toy-story / finding-nemo mashup. -satyakam

  • £50 bounty, for a duck? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tehSpork (1000190) on Monday July 02 2007, @05:23AM (#19714967)
    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.

  • 1. Train ticket to West Country 2.Profit!! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by fantomas (94850) on Monday July 02 2007, @05:24AM (#19714979)
    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 [wikipedia.org] beached off Branscombe! Easier to sneak plastic ducks off the beach than BMW motorbikes....

  • This is actually interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Flying pig (925874) on Monday July 02 2007, @05:26AM (#19714993)
    and amazing that it got a reasonable and sensible write up in the Daily Mail. Perhaps now Mr. Blair has departed the Mail will be less of a feral beast (that's a UK reference for those of you in the rest of the world, don't worry about it) and more of a newspaper.

    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.

  • Welcome (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2007, @05:28AM (#19715001)
    As a native of the South-West of England I for one welcome our new faded yellow Chinese rubber duck overlords.

    • As an inhabitant of South West England (Score:5, Funny)

      by Flying pig (925874) on Monday July 02 2007, @06:48AM (#19715359)
      I can't help thinking that they can't be any worse than our local District Council. The ducks are mostly going in the same direction, and not spending all their time in in-fighting. What's more, they've spent the last 15 years doing useful scientific research instead of allowing unrestricted development in towns and blocking anything that might cause a rich NIMBY from London to have to look at a house belonging to someone else.

      Yes, replacing the Council with faded yellow Chinese rubber ducks might actually be an improvement.

  • Harper's article on the floatees (Score:5, Informative)

    by Tim (686) <timr.u@washington@edu> on Monday July 02 2007, @05:34AM (#19715019) Homepage
    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 [harpers.org] 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/ [beachcombersalert.org]

  • Old News (Score:4, Informative)

    by Suit (106935) on Monday July 02 2007, @06:45AM (#19715341)
    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.

  • Convoy (Score:5, Funny)

    by asifyoucare (302582) on Monday July 02 2007, @07:10AM (#19715449)
    Rubber Duck says "looks like we got ourselves a convoy".

    Scary thing was "Convoy" had a B-side. Imagine how bad that must've been.

  • So this is how it ends *sniff* (Score:5, Funny)

    by Agilus (471376) on Monday July 02 2007, @09:19AM (#19716267) Homepage
    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?!?

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