Show the Flow

_{(4 min read)}

In our last post we told the story that geodata is not only about high-definition maps and cadastral data. With the help of location you can make events visible. The recent post was about preserving history events, this post is about understanding natural events.

It sometimes happens that huge cargo ships lose containers on the high seas during storms. And sometimes it happens that this cargo re-emerges somewhere else. In principal this is waste polluting the oceans and coastlines and contaminating sea dwellers. But sometimes you can get something positive out of such kind of accident. The plot thickens if we know when and where the cargo got dropped and when and where it re-appeared. And when something special was lost, it is much easier to trace the flotsam.

At the begin of January 1992 a cargo ship lost during a heavy storm in the North Pacific Ocean close to the International Date Line a container with 28,800 bath ducks (and turtles and frogs). In the next years this cargo appeared with the help of wind and ocean drift in Alaska, Kamchatka and again in the Pacific. Some of them appeared in Hawaii and Australia and another bath toy re-emerged in the North Atlantic, in pack ice (!) and in Scotland as well as England. Peak recoveries of these bath toys were made 1994, 1998, 2001 and 2003… do we see a pattern?

It stared with 80,000 Nike sneakers (and noodle tins – yes they float) in 1990. The scientist Curtis Ebbesmeyer stared to track these flotsams and established a crowd-sourced reporting system to accumulate all places where (and when) the cargo was found (supported by rewards for reporting). With this information it was possible to reconstruct itineraries and journey times of the flotsam and start to learn more about the mechanics of our oceans!

The idea of using floating probes isn’t new. Already in 1864 the scientist Georg von Neumayer launched bottle message requesting the finder to return the message with added finding place and time. The first bottle started its journey at Cape Horn, Chile and was found in Australia.

Nowadays so-called “drifters” are used to understand the flow. Often, they are equipped with a global navigation satellite system receiver and sensors to measure e.g., temperature, salt content and air pressure. They can collect data during the travel and how environmental conditions are changing. Nevertheless they are significantly more expensive than a container full of bath toys. The huge amount of bath toys and sneakers created a lot of data points which was not possible to generate by usual research projects until now.

With the help of the recognizable bath toy or sneaker flotsam science was able to understand the ocean currents better than before. It was possible to prove hypothesis, for example the re-emerge of the bath ducks in Scotland and England showed that a northern passage using pack ice is possible. The periodic peak-appearance of the toys at same locations showed that they are traveling in circles. And since they are floating since 30 years it also shows home much time is needed to “dismantle” plastic even if it is exposed to UV radiation and waves (and when the plastic object “degrades” it becomes even more hazardous for all living beings).

Why are we now reporting about this topic? Recently a young beachcomber found a Lego Octopus, which is considered as the holy grail of currently known flotsams. Lego spent a lot of years to find a new sustainable material to produce their bricks but failed. All new sustainable materials lacked of durability and production accuracy. Now the durability of the Lego pieces was kind of helpful to get “friendly floatees” as well.

In mid of February 1997 a cargo ship lost close to the Cornwall, England among 62 shipping containers a container with five million Lego parts (more ironical diving parts and sea creatures but no famous interlocking bricks). Roughly 67% of these pieces where light enough to float and were found at up to 40 beaches in Cornwall but some of them stared their journey to Wales, Ireland and continued to Texas and even Australia! The items close to England are often caught in fisherman’s nets or still washing up at the shores. Beachcombers cleaning up the beaches sometimes find a treasure such as the Lego Octopus because only 4,200 of them fell over board. Sometimes the Lego pieces are in good shape and you can easily add them to your collection of Lego bricks but sometimes they are already worn by UV radiation and waves. At the end we still have to treat them as waste, which does not belong into the nature.

At the end the area covered by plastic waste in the Pacific Ocean is estimated to be as large as one to twenty times as Texas, US (roughly between 700,000 to 15,000,000 square kilometers) or something between two times of Germany or 1.5 times of Europe (including Russia until the Ural Mountains)! This is a mind-blowing amount and it will contaminate the sea dwellers first and then all other living beings for ages. Using flotsam to understand the mechanics of our world is good thing but to not create waste in the first place is the better solution. Modern “drifters” are often made from wood (excluding the sensors and communication unit).