Flotsam science: you can learn a lot from floating junk

Science News,  April 28, 2007  by Sid Perkins

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In January 1992, a freighter crossing the Pacific from Hong Kong to Tacoma, Wash., ran into rough weather near the International Date Line As the ship heaved through the storm-tossed seas, several cargo containers on deck--including one filled with tens of thousands of plastic tub toys--came loose, fell overboard, and broke apart. Seven months after the spill, the plastic ducks, beavers, turtles, and frogs began washing up on beaches. Scientists who track ocean currents were ecstatic.

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. However, most of the drifters have remained stuck in the Pacific Subarctic Gyre, a set of deepwater and surface currents spanning an area the size of the continental United States that generally flows counterclockwise around the northern Pacific Ocean.

Worldwide, about 10,000 cargo containers fall overboard each year. In most parts of the world, the dispersal of flotsam isn't of major interest to researchers. But along the bustling trade routes that link eastern Asia to North America, the tennis shoes, kids' sandals, hockey gloves, and other stuff that drops off ships is enabling scientists to fill in details of how the Pacific Subarctic Gyre works.

Often, the lost items float and can be readily identified as coming from a ship at a certain location. Recently, Ebbesmeyer and his colleagues used almost a century of data from such floating objects to map the gyre's major subcurrents and swirls.

Now, for the first time, scientists have determined that a lap around the Pacific Subarctic Gyre takes about 3 years. That information, in turn, led Ebbesmeyer and his colleagues to identify long-term variations in water temperature and salinity in the North Pacific that hadn't been noted previously.

All this from studying flotsam.

HIGH SEAS DRIFTERS The ocean is teeming with a variety of scientific instruments. When it comes to measuring surface currents, however, these devices have their limitations.

For example, in the past 7 years, scientists have deployed about 2,800 heavily instrumented, satellite-monitored probes called Argo floats (SN: 2/1/03, p. 75). They drift through the ocean at depths of about 2 kilometers. Every 10 days or so, they pop up to measure the overlying water's temperature and salinity. However, the direction and speed of deep currents, where these high-tech probes spend most of their time, don't necessarily match those of currents in the top few meters--let alone centimeters--of ocean, says Ebbesmeyer. So, the path of an Argo float provides little information about surface currents.

Probes specifically designed to ride surface currents face different problems. Their sensors can quickly become obstructed by algae, barnacles, and other organisms that thrive in the sunlit portion of the ocean.

What's more, regardless of the depths at which modern probes operate, their batteries fail within months. Generally, the probes haven't traveled more than 1,000 km in that time, says Thomas C. Royer, an oceanographer at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. That's only a small fraction of the path around the gyre.

"We've never had a good handle on how long it takes [floating] objects to go around the gyre, or even if they do," Royer adds.

To map the currents and clock their speeds, Ebbesmeyer, Royer, and their teammates circumvented the disadvantages of modern electronic probes by harnessing the power of floating junk. Because the Pacific is crisscrossed by major trade routes, "there's a lot of stuff out there," Ebbesmeyer notes. Many of those items can be traced back to specific spills, and if the lost objects are durable, they can drift in currents for years.

Take, for instance, a container that dropped overboard in the North Pacific in May 1990. It held 80,000 Nike sneakers--each of which carried a code number unique to its shipment. About 2,000 of those shoes have turned up on beaches since then. Ebbesmeyer's group stays in touch with networks of beachcombers who report finds from ship spills.

In January 2000, a cargo box contributed another batch of accidental tourists. It contained children's sandals that, like the sneakers, carried code numbers linking them to the particular shipment. Ten of the sandals have washed ashore on Alaska's Kodiak Island--some in 2001, others in 2005. None showed up in the intervening years.

The flotsam-recovery database that Ebbesmeyer and his colleagues maintain also includes information from some of the 19,000 beer bottles--containing identification numbers and contact information--that oceanographers threw off a boat far out in the Gulf of Alaska between 1956 and 1959. The last recording of one of these bottles washing ashore was in 1972, says Ebbesmeyer.