It's not easy being Kermitty green
During a storm in January 1992, a container with 28,000 children's bath toys was swept overboard from a ship in the North Pacific. Seeing an opportunity to study surface currents, oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer tracked the container, accumulating reports from beachcombers and coastal workers as they began to wash up on beaches.
Using computer models, they were able to predict correctly that toys would make landfall in Washington state, Japan and Alaska, and even become trapped in pack ice and spend years creeping across the top of the world before making an eventual reappearance in the North Atlantic.
"Ultimately," Ebbesmeyer wrote, "the toys will turn to dust, joining the scum of plastic powder which rides the global ocean." For some reason, media accounts of the story always carried the image of a solitary rubber duck, though the toys had also included beavers, turtles and frogs. "Maybe it's a kind of racism," Ebbesmeyer speculated. "Speciesism."