Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Friendly Floatees

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

In 1992 more than 28,000 rubber ducks got loose in the ocean and began a decades-long experiment in oceanography. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck Ahoy,

Mady. This is short stuff. This is a fun story. Yeah, you've heard of this before, right? I have. And I mean, it's about as fun as an ecological disaster can get. Well said, well said. And we are talking about an ecological disaster. And it's one that happens kind of frequently, which is the loss of a shipping container at sea. There's this insurance company, a marine cargo insurance company called TRG. And they estimate that every year, anywhere from 2,500 to 10,000 shipping containers, you know, those big giant shipping containers that double as like an entire semi truck, up to 10,000 of those just fall overboard into the sea every year. Did they get those out? No, no, they're gone for good.

If 10,000, up to 10,000, these are falling in every year. Like, that's a problem at some point, right? I guess not. I think we ship that much stuff that they're like, well, these people are going to have to wait a month and we'll get them some more. No, I mean, a problem for the ocean. Oh, I thought you meant a problem for the consumer. I mean, over 10 years, like it's up to 100,000 semi truck shipping containers just lying on the ocean. 10,000. What'd I say? 100,000. No, that's it over 10 years, though. Oh, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, I'm sure it is a problem or they always say that a problem is a benefit in disguise, isn't that the saying? Sure. So they probably make lemonade out of lemons down there.

That's my answer. There's a window open they didn't know about. That's right. All those metaphors. So you do make a good point. This shipping affects nature. I mean, we talked about it in our noise pollution episode, just how bad the shipping industry is for marine ecosystems. That's right, but we're here to talk about one specific container that had the cutest little ecological spill in history. The Ever Laurel was at sea. There was a bad storm. It was January 1992. It made it to port, but it lost a container along the way and that container contained 28,000 rubber duckies, frogs, beavers, and turtles. Yes, called friendly floaties. And the doors opened and they were all released into the ocean. Isn't that amazing? So these friendly floaties,

there was some point moments after this disaster happened where all 28,000, almost 29,000 friendly floaties, rubber duckies, rubber turtles, were all just floating together in this one very local area of the sea. No human as far as we know saw this. So you can just, you have to imagine it in your mind's eye, but it's easy to do and it's delightful in a way. It is delightful. But then they started to disperse, of course, because they're in the ocean. And of the 28,000, 19,000 went south and started showing up in places like Australia and Indonesia. Some others went across the Southern Pacific and west to South America and the rest headed north. And it's cute, but it is an environmental disaster. Somebody wrote a book called Moby Duck, which is even cuter. But another guy named Dr.

Curtis Ebsmeyer said, you know what? I'm going to make some lemonade out of this because I study ocean currents and all of a sudden I have 28,000 little specimens floating around. And I can see if I'm right about what I think the currents do down there. Yeah, because those oceanographers usually use like buoy transmitters. And those things are expensive and difficult to distribute and put out to sea. Now they had 28,000 of these things that they could basically use as stand-ins for those buoys as long as you could kind of keep track of them. But Ebsmeyer went the other route. He's like, no, I'm going to make predictions based on my models. And then we'll see if these things turn up where the models predict. And starting in 1996, he predicted that the first

friendly floaties would start showing up in Washington state. I think he was a UW professor. So he talked about Washington specifically and he was correct. They started showing up in 1996 and that definitely caught the attention of the media from that point on. I wonder if when it happened, he was like, oh man, I've been wanting to release 30,000 rubber duckies for years now and they just won't let me do it because it's not safe. I would guess he had those fantasies in his darkest moments. So let's take a break and think about that and come back and talk more about this, the cutest ecological disaster of all time. What advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do,

you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. And so my husband, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was

born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer,

I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So they found the first ones of these in Sitka, Alaska at the end of 1992. And then, I think, it took months and years for these things to wash all over the world. And this was that guy's big chance. What's his name? Dr. Curtis Ebsmeyer. Ebsmeyer's chance to see if his predictions are right. You're right. And he was right. Remember, he started predicting them that they would show up in

Washington. He's right about the first one. I didn't see how right he was about the rest. He was right about the rest, almost exactly. Like one of the great triumphs of the friendly floaty saga is that Dr. Curtis Ebsmeyer's models were like, these things are dead on. It actually advanced oceanography as far as I can tell. So a lot of them ended up, like you said, all over the world. But the ones that really kind of gripped everybody the most were the ones that ended up in the North Atlantic up near Scandinavia and then eventually down to the UK. And the reason that these are so gripping is because they think that those are the ones that moved northward from this wreck site. And they went up past Alaska,

where the first ones were found, up into the Arctic, where they became frozen in ice. And because of the conveyor belt by ocean currents, even up that far north, the ice eventually moved its way eastward. And then as the ice got into warmer and warmer waters, it started to melt, which freed those friendly floaties, which means that they made their own kind of reverse Northwest Passage through the Arctic, which people have been trying to do for hundreds of years now. The friendly floaties figured out, you just have to get trapped in ice for 10 years. Yeah, like they should not probably have gone north to come south into Europe normally. Like there's no way you predicted that, right?

I believe he did. Really? Yes, he predicted that they would start showing up in the UK about 10 years after the disaster, and they did. And I think it was because he had predicted they would go north, and it would take that long to make it across. Well, another good thing about this whole thing was that it did bring some more attention to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, something we talked about in the very early days of stuff you should know. That may not have even been me, was it?

No, it was, of course. It was the North Pacific subtropical gyre. And we've talked about that garbage patch a few times, I think, but some of them obviously made their way there and just became a part of that disaster. And so anytime a little bit of media tension is going to come that way, that's a good thing. Yeah, between that guy Donovan Hone's book, Moby Duck, and Curtis Ebsmeyer's press that he got from his models and predictions, I feel like that might have been what introduced the average person or the media to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Oh, yeah? Did that kick it off? I think this may have been what did it, actually, because it really alerted people to just how long plastic lasts in the ocean, because those ones that entered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, they're never going to make land. They're going to stay stuck in that circular current. And then over time, they're just going to break down further and further into smaller and smaller plastic. It doesn't biodegrade, it photodegrades. So chemically speaking, it never breaks apart. It just gets smaller and smaller, and then it enters the food chain. And once it's in there, it sticks around for a really long time, like hundreds and hundreds of years,

which that's where that ecological disaster part came from. Right. I think that these things were supposed to, I think he said, besides those that are out there forever, he said, I think the last ones will probably wash up somewhere in the UK. And he looked into his crystal ball and said, maybe 2007. And there was one found in Cornwall in 2007. So he's right about that. And they become kind of hot tickets on eBay, right? Yeah, I think at least a grand is the most that's been paid for one. That's definitely a first year's friendly floaty that was in that shipping container in 1992. What do you do with that thing, though, that you paid $1,000 for?

You hope somebody comes over and notices it on the shelf. And just the conversation starter? I guess. I don't know why else you'd want to possess it. There's like a whole group of beach comers. It's like a really big deal that I think that that will be a prize. But I think being a beach comer, you'd want to find it yourself rather than buying it on eBay. Who knows? Yeah. I'm not going to yuck anyone's yum. No, definitely not.

If you need that to get a good conversation going in your life, then more power to you. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Okay. Well, that's it for short stuff, everybody. And that's it for friendly floaties, because they've all made land or photo degraded into almost nothing by now. And since I said that, short stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app.

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