bowerbird
07-02-2007, 09:55 PM
With all the bad news this week I thought you could all do with a giggle.
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.
<snip>
"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.
http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn12168-uk-on-alert-for-plastic-duck-invasion.html
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.
<snip>
"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.
http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn12168-uk-on-alert-for-plastic-duck-invasion.html