watch the birdy

It is virtually impossible to track currents as they move around the oceans. The area that has to be studied is simply too vast. As Seattle-based oceanographer Dr Curtis Ebbesmeyer tells a BBC radio programme: 'We have a few satellite track drifters, but they cost about £2,700 apiece and don't last long.'

Now, though, he's got another way of monitoring currents: 29,000 plastic ducks, part of cargo which was washed overboard from a container ship in 1992 in the middle of the pacific.

For the first three years of their journey, they were trapped in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a gigantic swirl of rotating water thousands of miles across, which is also known as the Garbage Patch. At first, the ducks followed an anti- clockwise course along a 7,000-mile route in the Pacific.

"The ducks went around the North Pacific in three years - all the way from the spill site to Alaska, over to Japan and back to North America," says Dr Ebbesmeyer. "This was twice as fast as the water at the surface - so I began to call them hyper-ducks."

Two-thirds of them floated south at the rate of seven miles a day through the tropics, landing up on the shores of Indonesia, Australia and South America.

Meanwhile, 10,000 hardy Floatees headed north. First they were funnelled through the Bering Strait, the strip of water that divides Alaska from Russia, into the Arctic Ocean. There, the toys became trapped in ice before winds and currents moved them in their glacial containers on a 2,000-mile journey to the North Pole.

The pack-ice inched east and south, past Greenland and Iceland. As the ice melted, the plastic toys floated into the open waters of the North Atlantic. There, most of them swung south-west towards America. But not all the Floatees followed the same course. By the time they reach the British Isles, the ducks will have travelled around 21,800 miles. Their Pacific cousins have journeyed even further: up to 30,000 miles.

taken from Daily Mail