On 10 January 1992, a freighter en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma, Washington, got caught in a storm in the northern Pacific Ocean, and shipping containers filled with 29 000 plastic bathtub toys were lost overboard. Ten months later, brightly colored ducks, turtles, beavers, and frogs began showing up on beaches all along the coast of Alaska. Seattle-based oceanographers Curtis Ebbesmeyer and James Ingraham quickly realized that they had a massive inadvertent experiment on their hands. In their research, the two had been studying wind and sea circulation in the northwest Pacific by systematically dropping small numbers of labeled floats from fixed locations and hoping for their recovery. As they well knew, scientists understood the physics behind the winds and currents, but the large numbers of different interactions that occur made precise prediction difficult—even with the help of large computer models. The bathtub toys provided a windfall of data...
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1 April 2004
April 01 2004
Special Issue: The Kuiper Belt
The hundreds of objects lying beyond Neptune’s orbit provide data that enable scientists to trace the history of the outer planets. They also present an intriguing mystery.
Physics Today 57 (4), 49–54 (2004);