Review: June 2009

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Because water makes pages stick together, I have not experimented to see if this book floats, but it’s light and lively enough to make me reckon it might. If it did, Curtis Ebbesmeyer would no doubt use his promotional copies to track the great swirls of water that circulate around our oceans, as he has with so many other ordinary items. Some of the seaborne wanderers he describes are the stuff of legend, like the 78,932 Nike shoes that went overboard in the mid-Pacific on May 27, 1990. Their arrival on Oregon beaches the following year launched Ebbesmeyer, a consulting oceanographer, on a long and distinguished career as a scientific beachcomber and expert on ocean currents. He has inspired a far-flung network of like-minded flotsam lovers who coordinate the search for beached items of oceanographic interest through the Web site Beachcomber’s Alert.

With the help of Eric Scigliano, a Seattle journalist, Ebbesmeyer shares tales of drifting objects he’s encountered over the years, from bathtub toys to bowling balls. The latter, we learn, are cast adrift not by inept shipboard keglers, but by amateur cannon makers, who employ them as handy ammunition. While such flotsam is merely bizarre, there is a lot that is downright macabre, like the five human feet that beached along the Georgia Strait in southern British Columbia in 2007 and 2008. Ebbesmeyer notes that floating body parts are not uncommon, though it is usually the heads that come off first.

While the most scientifically informative tracers of currents are man-made objects whose time and point of entry are a matter of record, any object that floats can provide information on patterns of ocean circulation. Columbus, notably, embarked on his epochal voyage of discovery with more than blind faith—he had seen tropical seeds, stalks of bamboo, carved sticks, and abandoned kayaks washed ashore on the Azores. Clearly not European in origin, those unfamiliar objects beckoned him to follow the ocean drift back to where they came from. Flotsametrics, Ebbesmeyer implies, is as old as the sea itself.

Over the years, Ebbesmeyer and his colleagues have been able to trace the paths of eleven gigantic gyres, ocean-spanning circular currents that cover our planet like a system of interlocking gears. In the days of satellites and computerized buoys, the use of simple floating drifters to do cutting-edge research may seem counterintuitive. But Ebbesmeyer contends that too much information has led oceanographers to devote their time to studying minutiae, such as the tiny eddies that cause friction in waves. Shoes, messages in bottles, and floating rubber ducks have kept Ebbesmeyer’s eye on the big picture. Besides, as readers will readily agree, they’ve been a lot of fun to study.