Archive for March, 2009

Shipping containers do sometimes fall off the ships that are transporting them – usually during storms. It is estimated that thisaccounts for the loss of about 10,000 containers a year. This can prove hazardous to shipping asthe containersdo not always sink, but float at a low level making them difficult to spot. However, there have proved to be benefits from the lost shipping containers as they have provided oceanographers with unexpected opportunities to track global ocean currents that they would not have been able to do otherwise.

One famous incident is that of a 40 foot container full of childrens’ plastic bath toys that was swept overboard in the Pacific Ocean in 1992. The ship carrying the container full of almost 29,000 green frogs, blue turtles, red beavers and yellow ducks – known by the brand name of “Friendly Floatees” – left Hong Kong bound for Tacoma, Washington when it ran into a storm in the North Pacific Ocean near to the International Date Line. Twelve containers were swept overboard, including the one carrying the “Friendly Floatees”.Somehow, possibly due to a collision of some sort, the cargo container doors opened and the bath toys escaped. The packaging around them disintegrated, and the bath toys – which have no holes to take on water – escaped. This allowedCurtis Ebbesmeyer and James Ingraham, who trace ocean currents using flotsam movements, to track their progress.

The release of 29,000 floating objects gave the oceanographer pair an advantage over the normal test model they used – namely the release of 500-1000 drift bottles. The expected recovery rate in the Pacific is in the region of 2% so, rather than the 10 or 20 recoveries they would usually hope to make, Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham hoped to find near to 600 of the brightly coloured bath toys.

Sure enough, 10 months after the storm, the “Friendly Floatees” of ducks, beavers, turtles and frogs that had escaped from the shipping container began to turn up along the Alaskan coastline. With a reward of $100 savings bond given by the manufacturers of the toys to anyone who found a floatee, the bath toys journey was traced through Alaska to Washington State, back to Alaska and on to Japanthen finallythrough the Bering Strait to the Artic Ice Pack.

The knowledge gained by the brightly coloured bath toysjourney can help find those lost at sea, forecast the likely direction of spillage of oil or flotsam as well as helping to predict fish movements.

Two childrens books have been written about the journey of the Friendly Floatee bath toys, and the toys themselves now have become collectors’ items reaching in excess of $1,000 whenever they come up for sale!