Thousands of Rubber Ducks to Finally End Journey 210
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.'"
this will eventually turn into a pixar movie. (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Train ticket to West Country 2.Profit!! (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
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.
Re:Wanna bet? (Score:1, Interesting)
Ebb (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is actually interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is actually interesting... (Score:1, Interesting)
You can't be a climate change denier. Noone denies that the climate changes. What people deny is that anthropic global warming has been comprehensively proven. And given the maths of people like Mann, that's a pretty reasonable position.
The global warming scare suffers from the fact that the world has been cooling ever since 1998. So they are trying to change their title to 'climate change' which undeniably exists, but is a meaningless concept. And with you, they seem to have caught at least one moron!
For your information, the global warming scare is now in it's last days scientifically, as large holes are being picked in all the original assertions. The papers and the politicians will probably realise this in another five years or so!
Re:This is actually interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Harper's article on the floatees (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/28/doomed_du
Next up: Lava Ducks (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, you'd have to wait a bit longer than 4 years for them to pop up at their destination...
Chip H.
Re:How can they identify one ducky from another? (Score:3, Interesting)
WTF do you think happens to shit put in the ocean? It DILUTES! It DILUTES so freaking great that now Tuna is full of Mercury and orcas (killer whales) are going nuts because of the DILUTED pollutants.
The "dilution factor" works only if you have insignificant amount of pollution. Not cubic miles of shit dumped all over the place.
Thank you, but your kind of thinking is why there is 10 TIMES as much plastic in the ocean than algae and phytoplankton.