Article 18 MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE BY STUDYING OBJECTS CAST UP ON OUR SHORES, RESEARCHER CURTIS EBBESMEYER TRACES THE FLOW OF OCEAN CURRENTS BY KEVIN KRAJICK IF CURTIS EBBESMEYER HAD JUST ONE WORD FOR BUDDING ocean surface currents can be chaotically changeable; if oceanographers, it would probably be: plastics. If he had two bathtub toys are dumped, say, in the middle of the more than one, he might add: roll-on antiperspirant balls, Pacific at the same moment in the same spot, one may toxic-waste containers, computer monitors, lightbulbs, wash up in Hawaii while the other might end up frozen armadas of toys and sporting goods, toilet seats, bales of in an Arctic ice floe. rubber and marijuana, explosive devices, surfboards, co- I accidentally entered the world of long-distance float- conuts, aircraft, the occasional human body, and a sur- ables on a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker traversing prising number of genuine messages in bottles. The seas the Northwest Passage—that frozen labyrinth of islands are wonderfully, horribly full of floating things. Sooner or where Arctic ice floes slowly drain toward the Atlantic. In later, many of them wash up on the beach; and on the this treeless region, I was watching off the bow one day way, some make epic continent-to-continent journeys, for polar bears and instead spied dead ahead a weathered thus forming new data points regarding the complex do- tree fragment in the ice. Eddy Carmack, an onboard ings of long-distance ocean current systems—the subject oceanographer specializing in water movements such as of Ebbesmeyer’s work. eddies, assured me this was normal. “Trees fall off banks Scientists study currents ever more intensely: they af- of north-flowing Siberian and Canadian rivers,” he said. fect not only transportation but weather, biology, evolu- “Then they move into the sea ice. They may go around tion and climate change. Most oceanographers use satellites clockwise with the Transarctic Drift”—a great gyre cir- and high-tech buoys for tracking them; Ebbesmeyer, a cling the Arctic Ocean—“for 30 years. Eventually, the tree self-described “filter feeder on floating objects,” stub- gets spit out near Greenland. If it’s not too waterlogged, bornly does it the old-fashioned way—by studying maybe then it circles the Atlantic for a while. Maybe it movements of random junk. Part reporter and historian, lands in England or North Carolina, then somebody puts part water physicist, he has sources everywhere, includ- it on the mantel. There’s a lot of odd stuff like that.” Car- ing his own vast, ragtag worldwide army of beachcomb- mack jotted down the Seattle phone number of Curt ers. “The literature of things that float from here to there Ebbesmeyer—the man he said knew the most about such is so scattered it makes no sense until you compress it,” he odd stuff. says. “Then it begins to take on a glow, like radium.” Ebbesmeyer got started in the mid-1960s with Mobil His contributions to the literature range from the sem- Oil as a roustabout, then, after attending the University of inal to the semi-wacky, but we know one thing: he is Washington, an oceanographer. A lot of Mobil’s oil was probably the only scientist to have posed for People mag- under the frigid Grand Banks off Newfoundland; azine mostly naked (grayed in the chest hairs, but looking Ebbesmeyer was told to figure out how to tow approach- good) in the pool with a floating bathtub ducky, a souve- ing icebergs—the largest floating objects in the world— nir of one of his greatest research triumphs. Colleagues away from drilling platforms. In 1974 he joined Evans- with fancier instruments and stiffer attitudes may sneer, Hamilton, Inc., a small oceanographic consulting firm but deep down they must suspect the truth: he has more specializing in measuring and understanding ocean cur- fun than they do. Along the way, he has learned that rents. His projects have included placing sewage outfalls 1 ANNUAL EDITIONS to minimize impact on shore (“Did you know 10 percent long enough for someone to come along at just the right of sewage floats even after secondary treatment?”) and moment to discover it. But objects do. Boy, do they. tracking oil slicks (of his work on the Exxon Valdez spill: In 1959, the Guinness brewing company of Dublin “Did you know oranges are good experimental surro- dumped 150,000 of its bottles into the Atlantic and Carib- gates? For some reason, if you dump thousands in seawa- bean, each containing a scroll bearing greetings from ter, they’ll distribute themselves exactly like spilled oil”). “King Neptune” extolling Guinness and providing in- structions for converting the bottle into a lamp. They Floatables of every sort—hockey were so well sealed with cork, wax and lead tape, Guin- ness predicted they would go 500 years. According to one gloves and life buoys, seedpods and of Ebbesmeyer’s sources, about 80 bottles made it to bathtub toys—form the raw materials Coats Island in Canada’s Hudson Bay, to be spotted by Inuit hunters. The mystified Inuit used the bottles for tar- underlying oceanographer Ebbes- get practice, but then saw the scrolls and buried the rest meyer’s investigations. in an unmarked grave. Ebbesmeyer loves such arcana, but must admit that his Each ocean, carrying the long-distance floatables stud- first love is garbage. There is so much of it. And most is ied by Ebbesmeyer, hosts one or more huge gyres shaped plastic. The buoyant, indestructible stuff has exploded by prevailing winds, Earth’s rotation and bordering land- since the 1950s and ’60s; before that most marine garbage masses. The Gulf Stream, skirting the U.S. East Coast, is was organic, so it eventually rotted or sank. The bulk may part of a clockwise pattern of surface currents that carries come from land, dumped offshore or floated out rivers, Caribbean debris past Nantucket, toward Iceland, to the but ships contribute much. Lost synthetic fishing gear coasts of Norway and Britain, around the calm center of alone—nets, traps, buoys, lines, packing material—may the Sargasso Sea, and back again. In the Pacific, the Kuro- run 150,000 tons a year. More is washed or thrown off shio, or Japanese, Current arcs clockwise away from Ja- merchant and pleasure vessels, despite a 1987 interna- pan and becomes the North Pacific Drift, then turns south tional convention supposedly curbing marine dumping. 200 to 500 miles off Washington or Oregon, where it is As many as 1,000 or more boxcar-size shipping contain- called the California Current. Off Baja California, it turns ers—perhaps the most fruitful sources of intriguing ob- back out, passing Hawaii, heading for the Philippines and jects—fall off ships annually, releasing fleets of floatable China, and back to Japan. An object may take six years to goods. complete the roughly 14,000-mile circuit. The results are horrifying. In some years tens of thou- Unless sidetracked in any of countless ways. Storms sands of seals and hundreds of thousands of seabirds drive floaters off track, especially ones with windage— may die entangled in lost fishing gear. Turtles, whales, exposed surface area making a sail—into countercurrents fish and at least 100 seabird species mistake plastics for or competing gyres, like the North Pacific’s counterclock- floating food: autopsied animals are often crammed with wise Alaska Current, which can snag something from the cigarette lighters, plastic bags, tampon applicators, toy Pacific Northwest and send it towards Siberia, or filter it soldiers. Old plastics break up under ultraviolet radiation through the teeth of the Aleutians to be sucked through and waves, but never die; they turn into “nurdles”—col- the Bering Strait and into the swirling belly of the Arctic. orful, anonymous fingernail- to BB-size bits. The ocean Alternatively, junk may hang out for years if it drifts into keeps trying to cleanse itself of them like a cold sufferer the eyes of the great oceanic gyres. Also, strong winds can spitting phlegm. After a recent count, the Southern Cali- cause water masses to upwell or downwell powerfully, fornia Coastal Water Research Project estimated there which is reflected both in surface movements and in huge were more than one million per mile along Orange worldwide submarine currents that flow their own sepa- County beaches. “To my horror and fascination, plastic rate ways—a whole other story. trash just keeps going,” says Ebbesmeyer. “It is both sin- It is also becoming apparent that major surface current ister and useful.” systems, once thought stable as rocks, are capable of Others have long put floatables to work for science. huge, sudden shifts. In the prehistoric past, these could Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century explorers figured out have been the result—or cause—of drastic climate the outlines of major currents simply by watching where change; many scientists think that cycle could recur, with objects traveled, including their own vessels. Today, sci- dire results. Oceanic distributions of nutrients depend on entific institutions are deploying the latest tracking de- currents; hitchhiking on currents is integral to the life cy- vices: a planned fleet of 3,000-some PALACE floats, or cles of everything from eels to sharks. There’s also evi- Profiling Autonomous Lagrangian Circulation Explorers. dence that even large terrestrial animals may spread and These drifters automatically sample salinity and temper- evolve by the unlikely mechanism of “rafting” on ocean ature—also measures of water movements—and dive on debris. programmed schedules as deep as a mile to catch various It seems unlikely also that any small human-made ob- current layers, surfacing occasionally like U-boats to ject can survive a long voyage, make it to a beach and stay transmit data to satellites.