Twenty-eight thousand plastic bath toys were dumped into the middle of the Pacific Ocean in 1992 when a shipping container tumbled off a cargo vessel during a severe storm.

A closer look

Twenty-eight thousand plastic bath toys were dumped into the middle of the Pacific Ocean in 1992 when a shipping container tumbled off a cargo vessel during a severe storm. This armada of yellow rubber ducks, blue turtles, and green frogs spent the next two decades floating around the globe, inadvertently providing oceanographers with incredibly accurate data about global water currents. Scientists literally tracked these cheap plastic trinkets as they washed up on shores from Scotland to Australia, proving that millions of dollars in highly sophisticated tracking technology can easily be outperformed by a shipment of child bathtub accessories. Shipping companies lose thousands of containers at sea every single year, so our oceans are currently filled with a chaotic mixture of toxic pollutants, majestic marine life, and a slowly degrading fleet of cheerful novelty toys tracking the ocean currents