Curtis ebbesmeyer biography
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Flotsametrics and the Floating World How One Man's Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science
About this book
Curtis Ebbesmeyer is no ordinary scientist. Though he has degrees in engineering and oceanography, he's never held a traditional academic post, choosing instead to consult, for everyone from the oil companies to Seattle sewage treatment facilities to the Navy, and then, along the way, he's followed his interests, researching many different aspects of ocean currents. In May 1990 a Korean freighter was wracked by a storm and spilled its cargo – over 60,000 Nike sneakers – into the North Pacific.
Soon, these sneakers were carried away on the ocean's currents and found washing up on coasts around the world. Ebbesmeyer realized that he could use the exact time and location of the spill, along with the location that each sneaker (conveniently individually tagged) was salvaged to track the ocean current which brought it there! This new science technique quickly captured the imaginations of beachcombers and media around the world, particularly after the spill of 29,000 plastic bath toys in 1992.
Ebbesmeyer gathered a worldwide team of volunteers, and continued to search out and document the location at which
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Curtis Charles Ebbesmeyer (born April 24, 1943) is an American oceanographer based in Seattle, Washington. In retirement, he has studied the movement of flotsam to track ocean currents. He gained public attention by his reporting of studies of the movement and distribution of a consignment of rubber bath toys, which were washed from a ship into the Pacific Ocean in 1992, and continued to be collected from Northwest beaches for more than twelve years. He has established a network among beachcombers to track and report such materials, and in 1996 founded the nonprofit Beachcombers' and Oceanographers' International Association. He also writes and publishes its magazine Beachcombers' Alert.
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