Customer Reviews

Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man's Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science

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This book contains many charming anecdotes about how floating objects,
from garbage to sneakers to dead bodies, are carried around by the
surface currents of the ocean. I particularly liked the extended
discussion of how careful observation of flotsam may have persuaded
Columbus that the ocean wasn't too wide to cross to India. The book
also gives some nice descriptions of what its like to conduct science
at sea.

However, as a physical oceanographer, I was disappointed and finally
infuriated by the book's neglect of the discoveries of literally
hundreds of scientists who have studied ocean circulation in the last
century. The book argues for new names of the major ocean gyres but
says little about how the gyres work. Other fascinating topics in
physical oceanography poorly explained by the book are the
relationship between the wind and ocean currents, the existence and
cause of strong currents on the western side of gyres, and the way the
Earth's rotation creates a simple relation between water velocity and
pressure. An intrinsic feature of ocean dynamics is that surface
water tends to converge (draw together in the center) in the
subtropical gyres and diverge (float apart) in the subpolar gyres.
This is very important for understanding why garbage patchs would
accumulate in the subtropical gyres and make landfall adjacent to the
subpolar gyres. Based on the book's discussions of physical
oceanography, I suspect the book could have said more about garbage
and other flotsam as well.

The large gaps in explanation would be less irritating if the book
didn't sometimes give the impression that Dr. Ebbesmeyer was
practically the only person studying ocean circulation. Readers of
the book will learn about the bottles thrown into the ocean by
preachers to evangelize strangers, but not about the thousands of
remotely-tracked drifters placed in the ocean by scientists to trace
the currents. Much of the book gives biographical information which
is sometimes interesting and relevant but sometimes drifts into
unconnected personal reminiscence. The book would have been much
better if some of the biographical parts were replaced by better
descriptions of the scientific context of Dr. Ebbesmeyer's quest for
the rubber ducky.

Ebbesmeyer is obviously a scientist, and obviously a good one. You catch glimpses of this throughout the book. His studies of ocean currents are obviously well-worked and well-researched, and his publication history is solid. In the Appendices you see data and it's obvious that he knows how to interpret and work with it.

Too bad the book reads like it was written by my grandfather. This is probably Scigliano's fault, as he's the non-scientist, writer here. But someone should have explained to them both that there are two types of audience: one that would read a book like this to hear about people who live on the beach and would be interested in stories about scattering Ebbesmeyer's friends' ashes at sea, and others who would read the book to obtain information that will help them learn more about something they think is an important scientific phenomenon. By including too much of the former, the authors have squandered the chance to provide the latter.

I expected science. I got folksy wisdom. Not the same thing.

For some reason, people tend to flock to the water. Especially when vacation calls. There is something magical about sitting on a beach, watching the waves. Or in having a cold beverage while gazing at the vastness of the ocean. This migration to the water seems to be part of human nature - a throw back to some ancient time. As we are in the midst of summer, a book concerning the oceans, and things that float on it, seems like a great idea. Part science, part autobiography, part cautionary tale, Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man's Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science, by Curt Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano, makes for the perfectly literal beach book.

Contents: Preface: A New World, Chasing Water; Oil and Icebergs; Messages in Bottles; Eureka, a Sneaker!; Coffins, Castaways, and Cadavers; The Admiral of the Floating World; Borne on a Black Current; The Great Conveyor; Ashes to Ashes, Life from the Sea; Junk Beach and Garbage Patch; The Synthetic Sea; The Music of the Gyres; Appendix A: Urban Legends of the Sea; Appendix B: A Million Drifting Messages; Appendix C: The Oceanic Gyres; Appendix D: Ocean Memory; Appendix E: Harmonics of the Gyres; Acknowledgements; Illustration Credits; Glossary; Further Reading; Index

Dr. Curt Ebbesmeyer wasn't always an oceanographer; his undergraduate degree is in Mechanical Engineering and after college, he landed a job with Mobil Oil. Soon, he decided he wanted a graduate degree and gravitated toward two possibilities; nuclear engineering and oceanography. His wife was interested in library sciences. Deciding on a college that was strong in all three took him to the University of Washington. It was there that Dr. Ebbesmeyer decided on oceanography. Flotsametrics is the story of Ebbesmeyer's rise to the top of oceanography by, of all things, studying and reporting on the flotsam and jetsam in the ocean. While he made a name for himself studying Puget Sound and the effects of wastewater discharged in it, he rose to prominence by researching and reporting on the beaching of thousands of toy ducks on the western coast of North America. Using a software program, OSCURS, developed by a friend, he was able to accurately predict where and when flotsam would wash up on the shore. With this knowledge, he was able to better study the gyres, continental-scale closed loops of water around which flotsam drifts, in the oceans of the world. He also coined the term "garbage patch," which are areas within a gyre where drifting objects collect. These areas create giant garbage dumps. one of which is called Junk Beach and is located on Hawaii's Big Island. Interestingly, Ebbesmeyer reveals the rhythmic nature of the world's oceans, adding an underlying beauty to the water. Finally, he weighs in with his thoughts on global warming and effect that it will have on the gyres as well as the pervasiveness of plastics in the oceans.

Like the tides, this book rises and falls. The science of the gyres, flotsam, garbage patches, and the cautionary words allow this book to sail. When Ebbesmeyer recounts his life, it has a dragging effect on the reader. I am sure that he has a wealth of interesting and lively anecdotes, however the ones that he chose for this book are overshadowed by the flotsam. While it makes for a few uninteresting pages, when he returns the seas, the pace really picks up. We are treated to maps, diagrams, and family pictures that add to the stories that he relates. Written in a manner that is accessible to everyone, his passion for the oceans is shared with the reader, who cannot close the book without having a better understanding of them. He is not heavy handed with global warming, but rather brings a different perspective; the plastics that pollute our oceans may be affecting the weather, and, without a doubt, the creatures that inhabit it and fly over it. While the chapter on the garbage patch was unnerving, he shows how these gathering places showed early voyagers where to make camp, provided Christopher Columbus with the knowledge that there is something out there, over the horizon, and brought iron and wood to remote areas of the world. If you live in Washington state or on or near an ocean, this is a very worthwhile book. For the rest of us, it no less interesting, as the oceans affect all of us. And if you have ever thrown a message in a bottle into the water, Ebbesmeyer will show you where it may have made landfall.

Curtis Ebbesmeyer graduated from college with a degree in mechanical engineering. When he went to work for Big Oil, he also got his doctorate in oceanography. He got to travel all over the world because ocean flows affect oil rigs. He became interested in sea currents and in beaches and how debris is carried onto land. And then in 1990 five shipping containers full of shoes washed off a ship, and it set Ebbesmeyer into his true scientific calling, which has made him world famous. In _Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man's Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science_ (Smithsonian Books / Collins), Ebbesmeyer, writing with reporter Eric Scigliano, has given an anecdote-filled autobiography, along with plenty of instruction in oceanography basics. It is a lively, funny look at a life spent doing serious science in an eccentric way. Ebbesmeyer tells us not only about adventures at sea and combing beaches, but also about the joys and frustrations of such things as getting peer-reviewed articles published. His book is a welcome look at what a particular scientific life has been like.

It was Ebbesmeyer's mother in 1991 who clipped an article for him to see. Nike shoes were landing all over the Oregon coast. Beachcombers helped him document where the shoes were found, and he started asking questions about where they came from. Nike was helpful. Not only could it tell him the exact location of the spill, but every single shoe is stamped with an ID number, which can be tracked back to the particular container that spilled it. Ebbesmeyer teamed with colleague Jim Ingraham to use a computer program called the Ocean Surface Current Simulator. OSCURS tracked the shoes backwards to the spill origin, and forward as the ones that did not wash upon a beach the first go around went back to sea for another cycle. Ebbesmeyer's analyses of the flotsam tracks, besides getting him published in oceanographic journals, kept the Nike sneaker story alive and kept the newspapers interested in it. When in 1992 a flotilla of bathtub toys started washing up in Alaska, Ebbesmeyer and OSCURS went to work again. The bath toys created even more of a sensation than the shoes did. It isn't all shoes and plastic toys out there. There are bodies; Ebbesmeyer has been called in to evaluate cases in "forensic flotsamology". Then there is everyone's favorite jetsam (as opposed to flotsam, which is accidentally lost over the side, while jetsam is deliberately jettisoned), the bottle with a note in it. Ebbesmeyer calculates that in the past half century, something like six million bottles have been launched with messages in them, and only a tenth of them are found and recorded. He gives a little history of bottled message lore, including the bottle that may have actually gotten the finder a six million dollar bequest.

Ebbesmeyer says many people have asked him if he staged that first sneaker spill that got him into his career. No: "It's just the inevitable result of shipping billions of shoes across the sea each year." If it were just shoes, we would have little to worry about, but Ebbesmeyer's research has much that ought to disturb us. Everyone frets over oil spills, for instance. "But oil dissipates and breaks down, becoming food for microorganisms... When we turn petroleum into plastic, however, we make it far more persistent and, I fear, more deadly." He coined the term "garbage patch", and in some cases the patches are huge ocean expanses at the center of revolving currents. The plastic trash particles can get eaten by sea life, and if they get pounded enough into teensy bits, plankton eats them, as do the animals that feed on the plankton, and the animals that feed on those animals, including us. "Imagine salting your food with plastic ground to dust," he warns. Ebbesmeyer has been paying attention to all that stuff floating around, and his book is a call for all of us, beachcombers or not, to do the same.

When I picked up this book, I was expecting to learn about the study of flotsam and how it related to ocean currents. I expected to learn how the water in the world's oceans flow, which is something most of us don't think about. Some of what I was looking for was in this book, but the book's organization made it hard to really learn much of anything.

The book is presented as a book about an area of science, but it's really written like a memoir, with the science presented as it's discovered. This makes it hard to tie everything together or really understand what's going on until very late in the book. For example, the term "gyre" is introduced very early and used quite often, but it isn't defined until very late in the book, so the reader is left to try to figure out what it is for most of the book. There are also many, many references and discussions about ocean currents and where they flow, but there are very few maps, and these are too small to be very useful. Again, a tiny diagram of the main oceanic gyres is buried very late in the book, after the reader has had to spend many pages guessing where they are.

There's an interesting book in here somewhere. If it was organized around concepts and principles of ocean currents, with all of the flotsam examples used to support the concepts, I think it would have been much better.

Flotsametrics begins: "In the wee hours of May 27, 1990, midway between Seoul and Seattle, the freighter Hansa Carrier met a sudden storm and, as freighters often do, lost some of the cargo lashed high atop her deck. Twenty-one steel containers, each forty feet long, tore loose and plunged into the North Pacific. Five of those containers held high-priced Nike sports shoes bound for the basketball courts and city streets of America. One sank to the sea floor. Four broke open, spilling 61,820 shoes into the sea."

To be a successful scientist, it goes without saying that you have to be smart. You also have to be lucky or rather to be able to take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves. In this work, it quickly becomes apparent that Curtis Ebbesmeyer is smart and knows how to take advantage of circumstances.

After the shoes went into the Pacific Ocean and later started to wash ashore in the Pacific Northwest, Ebbesmeyer saw that they could be used as a probe to study the circulation patterns of the ocean. He hunted down the captain of the ship to determine the exact location of the shoe spill, obtained the shoe identification numbers from Nike, and then traced the shoes back to the original spill as they were discovered on the coast of North America. The locations and frequency of the landfalls, when interpreted, revealed the positional and temporal characteristics of the Pacific Ocean currents including those of the Turtle Gyre, one of eleven great circulation patterns of the world's oceans.

During the course of the book, we are exposed to an amazing number of observations: left and right shoes take different paths when they drift; bowling balls under 12 pounds will float while those over 12 pounds will sink; more than a million bottles with messages have been thrown into the sea. Many of the bottles are found decades after their dispersal.

While this book is written in the first person, it is more than a memoir and a look into the mind of a thinking scientist. It is primarily a study of the objects released into the oceans, both accidentally and deliberately and how the oceans work to concentrate or distribute the floating materials. Much of the plastic seems to last forever. There is a beach on the Big Island of Hawaii where the sand is now essentially granulated plastic. A point well-made in this work is that we really will have to do something about all the plastic dumped into the ocean before it is too late; too late for the survival of aquatic life and those who depend upon it, e.g., all of us.

This is a book that provided me with fresh ideas about the ocean gyres of the world and how these affect so many things we rarely wonder about - how salmon return, how oil spills move, why trash accumulates in parts of the ocean, how far floating bottles go and how quickly, and the survivability of some plastic fabrics and materials. The material presented is most interesting. How it is presented is somewhat repetitive and the book is longer than it need be. The price was right.

A very interesting book that gives you a new perspective on the ocean currents and how they interact with mans tendency to use the ocean as a refuse pile. A good read.

This is a very fascinating account of the author's discovery over his career of some of the dynamics of the circulation in the world's oceans. The memories intrude in several places where I would have preferred he had stuck with the science, but it is still a very interesting and thought provoking book. Another example of how good science can come from just about anything - like spilled shipping containers of tub toys - if one is paying attention.

Not a technical scientific paper full of obtuse jargon and data(which the author has done a good deal of in the past) - just a very interesting and informative look at a hopefully budding science that should be of extreme interest to all of us. The sea is 'our mother' and should be at the top of our list of endangered areas of the planet if we are serious about our future generations' survival. Indeed, we will all be hearing an immense amount of information regarding plastic pollution in the future - Dr Ebbesmeyer's simple and elegant theme is obvious once presented, and it is presented very well. I can't wait for his next book - I hope it addresses further the gyres and the 'rhythms of the sea' alluded to in the last chapter!