will sail before the wind as well as drift on a current).
At first, before they’d sprung leaks and taken on water, the toys rode high, skating across the Gulf of Alaska at an average rate of seven miles per day, almost twice as fast as the currents they were traveling. Among other things, the simulation revealed that in 1992 those currents had shifted to the north as a consequence of El Niño. If the toys had fallen overboard at the exact same spot just two years earlier, according to OSCURS, they would have taken a southerly route instead of a northerly one, ending up in the vicinity of Hawaii. In 1961, they would have drifted along the California coast.
Though with far less certainty, OSCURS could forecast as well as hindcast, and in this respect, Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham were like meteorologists of the waves. Because the weather of the ocean usually changes more slowly than the weather of the skies, they were also like clairvoyants. OSCURS was their crystal ball.
By simulating long-term mean surface geostrophic currents (those surface currents that flow steadily and enduringly, though not immutably, like rivers in the sea) as well as surface-mixed-layer currents that are functions of wind speed and direction (those currents that change almost as quickly as the skies), OSCURS could project the trajectories of the toys well into the future. According to the simulator’s predictions, some of the animals that remained afloat would eventually drift south, where they would either collide with the coast of Hawaii in March of 1997 or, more likely, get sucked into the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.
“Gyre is a fancy word for a current in a bowl of soup,” Ebbesmeyer likes to say. “You stir your soup, it goes around a few seconds.” The thermodynamic circulation of air, which we experience as wind, is like a giant spoon that never stops stirring. To make Ebbesmeyer’s analogy more accurate still, you’d have to set that bowl of soup aspin on a lazy Susan, since the earth’s rotation exerts a subtle yet profound influence on the movements of both water and air, an influence known to physical oceanographers as the Coriolis force. The Coriolis force explains why currents on the western edges of ocean basins are stronger than those along their eastern edges—why the Gulf Stream, for instance, is so much stronger than the Canary Current that flows south along Africa’s Atlantic coast.
Comprising four separate arcs—the easterly North Pacific Drift, the southerly California Current, the westerly North Equatorial Current, and the northerly Kuroshio (the Pacific’s equivalent of the Gulf Stream)—the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre revolves between the coasts of North America and Asia, from Washington State to Mexico to Japan and back again.1 Some of the toys, OSCURS predicted, would eventually escape the gyre’s orbit, spin off toward the Indian Ocean, and circumnavigate the globe.
Others would drift into the gyre’s becalmed heart where the prevailing atmospheric high has created what Ebbesmeyer christened “the Garbage Patch”—a purgatorial eddy in the waste stream that covers, Ebbesmeyer told me, as much of the earth’s surface as Texas. When he is being fastidious, Ebbesmeyer will point out that there are in fact many garbage patches in the world, the one in the North Pacific being simply the largest, so far as we know. For that reason he sometimes refers to it as the Great North Pacific Garbage Patch. Other times, in Beachcombers’ Alert! and elsewhere, he’ll distinguish between an Eastern Garbage Patch lying midway, roughly, between Hawaii and California, and a Western Garbage Patch, lying midway, roughly, between Hawaii and Japan. In fact, both patches are part of what most oceanographers call the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone—a bland term of art made blander still by its initials, STCZ. The scientific community’s love for acronyms and abbreviations, rivaled only by that of government bureaucrats, helps explain why Ebbesmeyer has enjoyed much more celebrity in the popular press than he has influence in the scientific community. He possesses a showman’s gift for folky coinages, but also, perhaps, a showman’s tendency to sensationalize. “It’s like Jupiter’s red spot,” he said. “It’s one of the great features of the planet Earth but you can’t see it.”
He’d never visited the Garbage Patch himself, but he had received eyewitness reports from sailors. “They’d be sailing through there with their motors on—not sailing, motors on,” he said. “No wind, glassy calm water, and they start spotting refrigerators and tires, and glass balls as far as you could see.”