snapping chains on two rows of six deck-stacked containers

 On January 6, 1992, Evergreen Marine’s Ever Laurel departed Hong Kong. On January 10 in the North Pacific, a storm heeled the ship 40°, snapping chains on two rows of six deck-stacked containers; twelve fell overboard. About 29,000 bath toys—yellow ducks, green frogs, blue turtles, red beavers—spilled into the sea near 44.7°N, 178.1°E. The first landed in Alaska on November 16, 1992; by August 1993 about 400 were found along 850 km. Oceanographers Curtis Ebbesmeyer and James Ingraham used the event to validate surface-current models, predicting arrivals in Washington State in 1996, and a route via the Bering Strait into Arctic ice, then the North Atlantic—later confirmed (e.g., Newfoundland in 2000, Scotland in 2003). The incident spotlighted global circulation—cold/warm currents and the “ocean conveyor belt”—and, conversely, the Pacific garbage patch reported widely in 1997, ~8 million tons of plastic entering oceans annually, and an estimated 171 trillion microplastic particles (~2.3 million tons). JPL also attempted a “rubber duck” experiment at Greenland’s Jakobshavn Glacier to trace meltwater pathways.