Friendly Floatees spill

Route taken by the Friendly Floatees initially lost in the Pacific Ocean in 1992.
Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer with flotsam (including some Friendly Floatees) that he observes to monitor ocean currents.

Friendly Floatees are plastic bath toys (including 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 28,800 Friendly Floatees—yellow ducks, red beavers, blue turtles, and green frogs—that were washed into the Pacific Ocean in 1992. Some of the toys landed along Pacific Ocean shores, such as Hawaii. Others traveled over 27,000 kilometres (17,000 mi), floating over the site where the Titanic sank, and spent years frozen in Arctic ice before reaching the U.S. Eastern Seaboard as well as British and Irish shores, fifteen years later, in 2007.[citation needed]