This is one of two threads on the subject of the plastic bath ducks tracking ocean currents, but I can't find the other.
Roderick B Smith
Rail News Victoria Editor
From Sun.31.7.11 Melbourne
Age.
www.theage.com.au/victoria/toys-make-like-ducks-and-get-the-flock-out-of-there-20110730-1i5pz.htmlToys make like ducks and get the flock out of there.
The hunt is on for nearly 29 000 rubber ducks across the world.
Moby-Dick is Herman Melville's 1851 story of the search for a great white whale; Moby-Duck is Donovan Hohn's 2011 story of the search for some little yellow ducks. 28 800 of them.
In Jan.92, the cargo ship
Ever Laurel was caught in a severe North Pacific storm, spilling several 12 m containers full of plastic bath toys overboard.
In November that year some of the ducks were washed up on the beaches of Alaska, 1500 km from the accident. Over the years there were more beachings, on the USA west coast, Russia, various Pacific Ocean atolls and Hawaii. Computer models predict that nearly 20 years later, more beachings may occur in Australia, South America, around Indian Ocean - even, via the Arctic, along the coast of Britain and east-coast USA. The beachings will continue until the sun, waves and wind eventually erode to pieces the remaining ducks.
For scientists - and now, writers - the epic, decades-long, transoceanic journeys by the little toys have been a boon. The ducks' odyssey has shed valuable insight into the behaviour of ocean currents and wind patterns and has spawned several journal articles and, recently, two books: Flotsametrics, by Curtis Ebbesmeyer, was published by HarperCollins in 2009; and Hohn's book, published by Scribe, comes out in Australia tomorrow. Legendary children's author Eric Carle published 10 Little Rubber Ducks, based on the incident, in 2005.
Hohn, a New York-based features editor for GQ, told the
Age that he came across a newspaper report of the story 5 years ago. His interest was initially piqued by the accident - ''the fact that containers fell off ships was astonishing'' - but he became fascinated by the lost contents.
''The image that comes unbidden to mind is tens of thousands of rubber duckies out on the deep. There's something humorous about that image … a rubber ducky is a childish plaything that's indigenous to the bathtub, is man-made and bright yellow. The ocean is terrifying and magnificent, God-like … mysteriously wrathful and difficult to fathom.''
When Hohn discovered the ducks had became a science experiment, he knew he had a book. ''The toys became data, a way of revealing the ocean currents. That made them all the more fascinating. I got a map … which plotted where these toys had been found … and also, using computer models, a prediction where the remaining ones would go. That map plotted a trail that I wanted to follow.''
Hohn, an admirer of Melville's book, enjoyed being a 21st-century version of Captain Ahab. ''One of the things Melville gets right is that the sea engenders fables. One of the questions that I took the better part of my book to answer is the tantalising [prospect] the ducks would have crossed the Arctic and made it to the North Atlantic. I like that because the Arctic is this inhospitable and mythic place where explorers go to die, with the duckies going through it.''
The book also shows the reader the Chinese factories where the ducks were made, the shipping conglomerates who own the container vessels, scientists who trek through Alaskan wilderness - so it reads like a fable on globalisation. That has attracted some criticism for Moby-Duck in the US - Scientific American's reviewer wrote that ''by the end of the book I wonder what the point is''.
Hohn defends his narrative. ''The book is very simple: Follow the trail of the toys.'' At least, he said, it is more readable than Melville's classic. ''Moby-Dick divides the world into zealots and people who say, OK, enough with the whiteness of the whale. Get back to the hunt.''
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