Flotsam science is the sober science of migrating rubber duckies:
Consequently, Dr. Behar and his colleagues at the University of Colorado this past August released 90 yellow rubber ducks into the melt water flowing down a chasm in the largest of Greenland’s 200 glaciers — the Jakobshavn Isbrae — which has been thinning rapidly since 1997. Each duck was imprinted with an email address and, in three languages, the offer of a reward. If all goes well, Dr. Behar hopes that one day they will emerge 30 miles or so away at the glacier’s edge in the open water of Disko Bay near Ilulissat, bobbing brightly amid the icebergs north of the Arctic Circle, each one a significant clue to just how warming temperatures may speed the glacier’s slide to the sea.
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Researchers call it flotsam science.As a scholarly discipline, it is perennially impoverished. Its only professional journal is a newsletter with a circulation of 600 called The Beachcombers Alert, published by retired oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer in Seattle. More than anyone, Dr. Ebbesmeyer turned every beachcomber’s passion for sea-swept debris into a research tool by establishing an international network to gather traceable flotsam, such as Dr. Behar’s yellow ducks.
Indeed, it was a shipment of such bath tub toys washed overboard in the Pacific during a 1992 storm that accidentally launched this unusual field.
Each of the 28,200 plastic ducks, turtles and frogs that spilled from the ill-fated cargo container was stamped with a unique manufacturing code. As they washed ashore — sometimes thousands of miles from the original spillage — scientists soon realized they could trace the toys back to the launch point, documenting previously unsuspected ocean currents.
In the years since, Dr. Ebbesmeyer and his colleagues have tracked flotillas of floating hockey gloves, sodden sneakers, Guinness bottles, Japanese tops and New England lobster pot tags. All were labeled with some unique identifier that, in the serendipity of science, turned them from trash into data points charting vast, circular ocean gyres.
These global conveyor belts swept some of the tub toys from the 1992 spill through the Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean, where the pack ice carried them over the North Pole into the North Atlantic Ocean, said Dr. Ebbesmeyer. Eleven years later in 2003, one of the plastic ducks turned up in Maine, while one of the plastic frogs washed up in Scotland, more than 7,000 miles from where it started.
Dr. Ebbesmeyer likes to call his research endeavor, documented last year in the American Geophysical Union’s journal, Eos, “accidental oceanography.”