Far-Flung Bathtub Toys (Rubber Ducks) Due in New England After Floating for 10 Years

BOSTON - Being thrown from a container ship, drifting for more than a decade, bobbing through three oceans — it's enough to turn a rubber duckie white.

A floating flock of the bathtub toys — along with beavers, turtles and frogs — is believed to be washing ashore somewhere along the New England coast, bleached and battered from a trans-Arctic journey. Oceanographers say the trip has taught them valuable lessons about the ocean's currents.

The toys have been adrift since 29,000 of them fell from a storm-tossed container ship en route from China to Seattle more than 11 years ago.

From a point in the Pacific Ocean near where the 45th parallel meets the international date line, they floated along the Alaska coast, reaching the Bering Strait by 1995 and Iceland five years later. By 2001 they had floated to the area in the north Atlantic where the Titanic sank.

"Some kept going, some turned and headed to Europe," says Curtis Ebbesmeyer of Seattle, a retired oceanographer who's been tracking the toys' progress. "By now, hundreds should be dispersed along the New England coast."

Ebbesmeyer has been able to track the toys with the help of duckies that washed ashore along the way. He said they have been a useful tool in teaching oceanography, and have shed light on the way surface currents behave.

They are also a sobering reminder that about 10,000 containers fall off cargo ships each year, creating all manner of flotsam and jetsam.

"When trash goes into the ocean, it doesn't disappear," Ebbesmeyer said. "It just goes somewhere else."

Fred Felleman, of the environmental group Ocean Advocates, said container ships carry 95 percent of the world's goods and are stacked higher and wider than ever before, raising the odds of spillage.

"Some 30 percent have hazardous materials in them. They're not just spilling Nikes," he said.

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It is in the breaking news sidebar!

If the writer means the standard truckbound 20 or 40 footers, I highly doubt this number

It's plausible. During a storm, a whole column of them can peel off the side of a ship. A man who worked with me years ago had a wife who worked in shipping for a consumer electronics company and this was apparently a big enough concern for her that she'd always schedule her containers to arrive first and leave last so that they'd be stacked near the middle of the ship. I can't imagine her going through all that trouble if this didn't happen very often. There is also no telling how many containers get "lost" somewhere closer to the docks.

For more on floating rubber things:

Time to Go Biodegradeable?
Sydney, Australia--Oceanographic scientists say they have discovered a vast, floating "reef" of the world's disposed condoms in the middle of the South Pacific, about halfway between Tahiti and Antarctica. The phenomenal mass is almost two miles long, an eighth of a mile wide, and in places up to 60 feet deep, the oceanographers say.
Mason Froule, Australian marine biologist at his country's Oceanographic Laboratory Outpost on Macquarie Island, South Pacific, said the bizarre accumulation is explained by a scientific term called "like aggregation"-- that is, the massing of similar objects over short or longer periods of time due to wind or ocean currents, magnetic fields, buoyancy and other conditions.

"It's fairly common in the world's oceans," he said: natural events such as red tides, for example, are instances of "like aggregation."

"People with pets that shed lots of hair can see it in their own homes," Froule added. "The dog sheds everywhere in the room, but after falling out, the fur soon collects in a few clumps and masses."

Froule said ocean "reefs" of styrofoam and detergent residues have been observed in the South Pacific and elsewhere for many years, but they are usually broken up by storms before they become large or hazardous.

He believes the huge concentration of condoms, not reported before, is more resilient than other "aggregating" ocean materials, and may have been developing for decades.

Froule said parts of the newly discovered reef are matted together so densely that "you could almost land a plane on it."

"I suppose it would be funny if it didn't pose the hazard it does to marine life and navigation," Froule stated. "I pity any freighter, submarine, or dolphin, for that matter, that might run into it."

The biologist said he and his Australian scientific colleagues will have the reef mapped by satellite and monitored from now on to see if it expands, breaks up, or drifts from its current location (reported at 63 degrees latitude and 154 degrees longitude).

Froule said there would not be much point in trying to break up the pulpy mass with explosives or other devices. "It seems pretty indestructible," he said.

The world's industrialized nations are estimated to consume and dispose of nearly 300 million condoms a year. Industry analysts say about a third of the discards become waterborne.

"I pity any freighter, submarine, or dolphin, for that matter, that might run into it."

Ahhh, it's condoms. Nothing would come of it....

I was at an Oregon beach a couple of weeks back, and actually saw some examples of this sort of aggregation. The beach had little deposits of white plastic, separate deposits of little bits of colored plastic (quite interesting and pretty in the sand, BTW), and more troubling, a couple of areas with some old syringes.

Rubber Duckie you're the one
You make bath time lots of fun
Rubber Duckie I'm awfully fond of you
Rubber Duckie joy of joys
When I squeeze you, you make noise
Rubber Duckie you're my very best friend it's true
I find a little fellow who's cute and yellow and chubby
Rub a dub dubby
Rubber Duckie you're so fine and I'm lucky that you're mine
Rubber Duckie I'd like a whole pond of you
Rubber Duckie I'm awfully fond of you

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