A container ship that He carried more than 28.000 plastic ducklings with him, was lost at sea in 1992 and it is now those plastic bath toys that continue to approach the shores of half the world.
It was in 1992, when that cargo ship, which contained 28.000 plastic ducklings in its galleries, left them floating in the sea when it was halfway between Hong Kong, the city from which he departed, to the United States.
No one at the time could have thought that some of the plastic toys on the freighter would still float in the oceans 20 years later.
To this day, that "fleet of plastic ducklings" are being cheered to revolutionize the understanding ocean currents, while teaching us a thing or two about the plastic pollution process, as the Independent indicates.
Since that year 1992, when they were abandoned at sea, the yellow ducklings have gone expanding around the world. Some have been seen off the coasts of Hawaii, Alaska, South America, Australia, and the Pacific Northwest; others have been found frozen in the Arctic Sea. While so many others have made their way as far as Scotland and Newfoundland in the Atlantic.
They even have a website where there are people who send pictures of the ducklings that are found in all the beaches of the world, as says Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a retired oceanographer and enthusiast of these lost toys.
But the most famous are the 2.000 that are still circulating in the currents of the North Pacific Gyre, a vortex of currents intermingling between Japan, Southeast Alaska, and the Aleutian Islands that the procession of ducklings helped identify.
And it is thanks to them that it has been able to identify this «turn». And it is that, until that moment, it was like know that there is a planet in the solar system, but from which you are not able to tell the size of its orbit around the sun. Now they know how long it takes: three years.
Today the North Pacific Giro is called the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patcha massive island of floating debris, which are for the most part plastic that spins like a vast and gigantic soup.
Worst of all is that today it is known that there are 11 of these types of "twists" around the world's oceans and that they are potentially the vestibule to the world of garbage in which we are transforming the planet. It's like the Diogenes syndrome in which a person he accumulates garbage and garbage in his house, but here, that house is our global village, our planet; tragic.