page_title: Friendly Floatees
hierarchical_section_title: Friendly Floatees
caption_attribution_description: English: Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer with flotsam he uses to monitor ocean currents.
context_page_description: Friendly Floatees are plastic rubber ducks marketed by The First Years, and made famous by the work of Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer who models ocean currents on the basis of flotsam movements. Ebbesmeyer studied the movements of a consignment of 29,000 Friendly Floatees—yellow ducks, red beavers, blue turtles and green frogs—which were washed into the Pacific Ocean in 1992. Some of the toys landed along Pacific Ocean shores, such as Hawaii. Others traveled over 17,000 miles, floating over the site where the Titanic sank, and spent years frozen in Arctic ice to reach the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, British and Irish shores 15 years later in 2007.
context_section_description: Friendly Floatees are plastic rubber ducks marketed by The First Years, and made famous by the work of Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer who models ocean currents on the basis of flotsam movements. Ebbesmeyer studied the movements of a consignment of 29,000 Friendly Floatees—yellow ducks, red beavers, blue turtles and green frogs—which were washed into the Pacific Ocean in 1992. Some of the toys landed along Pacific Ocean shores, such as Hawaii. Others traveled over 17,000 miles, floating over the site where the Titanic sank, and spent years frozen in Arctic ice to reach the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, British and Irish shores 15 years later in 2007.
caption: Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer with flotsam (including some Friendly Floatees) that he observes to monitor ocean currents.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "369671/5000", "Image YResolution": "369671/5000", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS4 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2009:08:14 04:55:57", "Image ExifOffset": "162", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "298", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4504", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "497", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "646"}