The sea was filled with yellow ducklings, blue turtles, green frogs and red beavers on January 10, 1992. A cargo ship fell overboard a container with 29,000 plastic toys for the bathtub during a violent storm in the North Pacific, right in the middle between Asia and America. Seven months after the accident, they began to meet hundreds of rubber dolls off the coast of Sitka, Alaska, not far from another spill of 61,000 Nike sneakers that occurred two years earlier. To the American oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer It then occurred to him to pay attention for years to sightings of those drifting objects, with the aim of learning to predict the Ocean currents. Four Spanish mathematicians, facing another monumental problem, have suddenly solved the enigma of rubber ducks floating in the Pacific: it was impossible to predict which beach they would appear on. It seems like fun, but the research is published in one of the best scientific journals in the world, PNAS, for its potential implications for humanity.
