atmospheric highs had created garbage patches in the five other subtropical gyres churning the world’s oceans—including the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre, which circumscribes the Sargasso Sea, so named because of the free-floating wilderness of sargasso seaweed that the currents have accumulated there. Later, skimming through Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, in a chapter about the Sargasso Sea, I’d come upon a helpful explanation for patches of garbage like the one at the heart of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. “The only explanation which can be given,” Captain Nemo says of the seaweed engulfing the Nautilus, “seems to me to result from the experience known to all the world. Place in a vase some fragments of cork or other floating body, and give to the water in the vase a circular movement, the scattered fragments will unite in a group in the centre of the liquid surface, that is to say, in the part least agitated. In the phenomenon we are considering, the Atlantic is the vase, the Gulf Stream the circular current, and the Sargasso Sea the central point at which the floating bodies unite.” Nemo’s explanation is mostly accurate, with this one correction: the circular current is the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre, of which the Gulf Stream describes only the north-by-northwesterly arc. A Sargasso of the Imagination, I thought as I listened to Ebbesmeyer describe the Garbage Patch. The phrase comes from a scene in The Day of the Locust, in which Nathanael West is describing a Hollywood backlot jumbled with miscellaneous properties and disassembled stage sets.2
There is no wilderness of seaweed at the center of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, which circles around the deepest waters on the planet, which are therefore among the least fertile. It is a kind of marine desert. If you went fishing in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, all you’d likely catch aside from garbage is plankton, a class of creatures that includes both flora (phytoplankton, tiny floating plants that photosynthesize sunlight at the water’s surface) and fauna (zooplankton, tiny floating animals that live off the tiny floating plants or each other). My Ocean Almanac calls phytoplankton “the pasture of the sea” because it is “the first link in the sea’s food chain.” Ten thousand pounds of phytoplankton will ultimately produce a single pound of tuna. The word plankton comes from the Greek planktos, meaning “wander” or “drift,” because that is how they get about, going wherever the currents carry them. In going adrift the castaway toys had become a species of giant ersatz plankton. So, in a way, had I.
OSCURS’s simulations predicted that relatively few of the bathtub toys would have ended up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The majority would have stayed well to the north, closer to the site of the spill, caught in the North Pacific Subpolar Gyre, which travels counterclockwise beneath a low-pressure system between the coasts of Alaska and Siberia. Smaller and stormier than the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, the Subpolar Gyre does not collect vast quantities of trash at its center. In counterclockwise gyres of the Northern Hemisphere, the currents don’t spiral inward to create convergence zones. They spiral divergently outward, toward shore. Convergence zones tend to collect flotsam. Divergence zones tend to expel it. Floatees trapped in the Subpolar Gyre, Ebbesmeyer’s research showed, would have remained in orbit, completing a lap around the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea once every three years, until a winter storm blew them ashore or they strayed through the Aleutians onto one of the northerly currents flowing through the Bering Strait.
There, OSCURS lost them.
Ingraham had not programmed his model to simulate the Arctic. To follow the animals into the ice, Ebbesmeyer had to rely on more primitive oceanographic methods. He went to a toy store and purchased a few dozen brand-new Floatees to use as lab animals in various experiments. Several specimens he subjected to the frigid conditions inside his kitchen freezer in order to find out whether cold would make them crack (it didn’t). Others he bludgeoned with a hammer to see what it would take to make them sink (a lot). Even breached and taking on water, they remained semibuoyant.
The toys, Ebbesmeyer concluded, could survive a voyage through the ice. Once beset, they would creep along at a rate of a mile or so per day. How long would it take them to reach the Atlantic? That was hard to say, impossible to say, perhaps. It depends which route they took. Data