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From The Sunday Times
July 23, 2006

Plastic toys that keep bob-bob-bobbing along chart the world's oceans

THE world’s oceans have been its bathtub as it has bobbed 10,000 miles on the sea surface. Now a plastic frog’s epic voyage from being washed overboard in the Pacific Ocean to drifting ashore on a Scottish isle more than a decade later is helping scientists to chart the movements of tides and currents across the globe, writes Maurice Chittenden.

The frog was one of 28,000 toys from a container that fell into the Pacific during a storm in 1992. The frog is the first to be identified as having reached Europe. Scientists are offering a $100 (£54) reward for the return of any others found in Europe.

Lessons learnt from the odyssey of the bathtime toys — ducks, turtles and beavers as well as frogs — are helping scientists to understand the cyclical “spin” of water on the sea’s surface. A forthcoming article in Eos, the journal of the American Geophysical Union, will map the “gyres”, the rotating movement of the surface water.

Most of the toys are thought to be still in a sub-polar gyre in the north Pacific. The frog spotted on Uig Sands on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides by Sonali Naik, a leading immigration barrister, is believed to have broken away from the gyre early on.

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer who runs the www.beachcombers.org website, said: “Who would have thought it: bathtime critters have given us a new science.”

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