The last toy sighting was in Alaska in late June, but the model predicts that, by now, some will probably have floated off south towards eastern Asia and Hawaii. Others would have drifted north, passing into the Bering Sea. From there the currents should have carried them through the Bering Strait, spilling them into the Arctic Ocean sometime in the mid 1990s.. nike shoes outlet <H1><a href="http://www.christianlouboutinshoes.ca/" title="christian louboutin shoes"><strong>christian louboutin shoes</strong></a></H1> "They would have grafted on to the ice, and the ice moves about a mile a day," Ebbesmeyer says. At that rate, the colourful flotilla should have emerged into the northern reaches of the Atlantic sometime in 2001, destined for the eastern seaboard of America, or for beaches from Iceland and Greenland down to Britain and Spain. "They should have been there for the last year or so, so in fact they're overdue," he says. And of those, there is no shortage. As well as tracking the ducks and their friends, Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham followed the journeys of 100,000 toy cars and balloons, 34,000 ice hockey gloves and five million pieces of Lego, spilled from ships over the years. Most recently, they have been collecting information about 33,000 Nike shoes that slipped from a ship off the California coast in December last year. nike shoes cheap And this is not the first time. In 1990, the same footwear company lost 80,000 shoes further out in the Pacific. Within two years, everything from children's trainers to hiking boots were washing up as far away as Hawaii. It all sounds jolly fun, but Ebbesmeyer stresses there is a serious side to the work highlighting the risk posed by the thousands of containers that fall off ships. "There are 50 of these big steel cargo containers floating in the Atlantic at any one time and they're definitely a hazard," he says. "The container companies don't tell me because they don't like to talk about accidents." He estimates that between 2000 and 10,000 containers are lost overboard every year, many of which spill open and release their contents into the sea.. nike shoes for girls These accidental experiments over the years have helped the Seattle pair to improve their computer model so much that they can now predict the drift of an object for decades into the future. "We're now finding out that drifting objects can stay at sea for as long as 30 years without ever touching land," Ebbesmeyer says. Objects spilt in the right spot will get sucked into a huge, never ending elliptical orbit between North America and Japan. <H1><a href="http://www.hermesoutlet.us/" title="hermes outlet"><strong>hermes outlet</strong></a></H1> Modelling the drifting cargo is not as simple as it sounds. Different objects float higher or lower in the water and so travel at different speeds because they are blown more or less by the wind. To account for this, each object in the model is given a wind factor: the ducks are reckoned to travel about twice as fast as the water, while a submerged Nike shoe goes about 20 per cent faster. nike shoes 2015 <H1><a href="http://www.isabel-marant-sneaker.us/" title="isabel marant sneaker"><strong>isabel marant sneaker</strong></a></H1> In 1982, a human skeleton was washed up in Hawaii still wearing its marine survival suit, but missing its left arm from below the elbow. By running the computer model backwards from that point, Ebbesmeyer has calculated that the body entered the water three years earlier off Alaska near the Arctic Sea. "Still to this day I'm trying to find out who he was," he says. nike shoes amazon <H1><a href="http://www.jordan-pas-cher.fr/" title="jordan par cher"><strong>jordan par cher</strong></a></H1> The computer also predicted the final resting place of George Karn, a crewman lost from a fishing boat accident in the Bering Sea in 2002. Last month, Karn's jawbone and survival suit were found washed up on a remote island off Alaska. "We just figured out where the boat caught fire and then let the model run forward," Ebbesmeyer says.
