Lost at Sea - Toy Ducks From China Reach The UK

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Lost at Sea - Toy Ducks From China Reach The UK

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uploaded by unofficialsquaw.com

gCaptain.com brings us this story: “Thousands of rubber
ducks to land on British shores after 15 year journey”. Apparently in
1992 a container filled with plastic bath toys fell off a ship shortly
after leaving China. 15 years and over 15,000 miles later the ducks are
starting to appear on the beaches of Great Britton. How did they get
there?

After falling overboard, the sea water corroded the
card-packaging and the toys floated free. They circled the northern
Pacific once before being washed up on the Alaskan shore, then all down
the West coast of Canada and the US.Mr Ebbesmeyer saw immediately how
valuable the little toys would be to scientific research of the great
ocean currents, the engine of the planet’s entire climate.

He correctly predicted what many thought was impossible - that
thousands of them would end up washed into the Arctic ice near Alaska,
and then move at a mile a day, frozen in the pack ice, around their
very own North-West Passage to the Atlantic.

It proved true years later and in 2003, the first “Friendly
Floatees” were found, frozen and then thawed out, on the eastern
seaboard of the U.S. and Canada.

So precious to science are they that the US firm that made them is offering a £50 bounty for finding one.

Read the rest of this amazing story HERE