On January 10, 1992, during a storm in the northern Pacific Ocean, near the International Date Line, twelve containers fell from the container ship Ever Laurel while traveling between Hong Kong and Tacoma, Washington. One of these containers held 28,800 Floatees—plastic bath toys shaped like red beavers, green frogs, blue turtles, and yellow ducks. The ship, operated by the Taiwanese company Evergreen, was en route between the Aleutian Islands and the International Date Line. The containers may have opened due to a collision with other containers or the ship itself, releasing the toys into the ocean. Each toy was attached to a cardboard base that quickly disintegrated in seawater, allowing the toys to float freely. Unlike many bath toys, the Floatees had no holes, making them waterproof and indestructible—thousands of identical, floating objects all released from the same place on the same day. The first sightings of these toys washing up on Alaskan coasts came in the autumn of 1992, more than 3,200 kilometers from where they originated. Some of the toys remained in Alaska, while others continued their journey, drifting toward Japan and then back toward Alaska. Some reached the Bering Strait, where they became trapped in Arctic ice. Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer estimated that it would take several years for these toys to travel around the North Pole before melting ice would release them into the Atlantic. By 2004, many had begun appearing in the Atlantic, and by 2007, some had reached the coasts of the British Isles—fifteen years after their journey began. Though bleached by the sun and saltwater, many still bore the "The First Years" brand, allowing researchers to identify them. A yellow duck, which began its journey in a frozen ocean and ended up on a beach in the Hebrides, illustrated the vast distances these objects could travel. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer, became interested in tracking the movement of these toys, recognizing their potential to help study ocean currents. Reports from beachcombers and coastal workers provided valuable data, with each found toy—identified by the date and location of its discovery—acting as a data point in an otherwise sparse and costly field of study. Ebbesmeyer and his colleague James Ingraham developed a model called Ocean Surface Currents Simulation (OSCAR), which used atmospheric pressure and meteorological data to predict the movement of floating objects. This model successfully predicted the path of the Floatees, which eventually returned to the state of Washington. The study also improved understanding of the North Pacific gyre, a large system of ocean currents. By following the journey of the toys, researchers discovered that floating objects can complete a full circuit around the subarctic gyre in about three years. Ebbesmeyer expanded his network of beachcombers to track not only the Floatees but also other floating debris from similar incidents. The model, later named Oscur, became so accurate that it attracted the attention of American and British law enforcement, who used it to trace the paths of missing persons or abandoned vessels at sea. What began as a playful children's toy had become a serious tool in maritime investigations. The Floatees were not the only accidental oceanographic experiment—earlier in the 1990s, a container shipwreck had released 80,000 Nike shoes into the ocean, which were also tracked by scientists. While these spills were environmentally damaging, they unintentionally provided scientists with decades of valuable data that would have been difficult and expensive to collect otherwise.