Thanks to Stephen Schwab for the tipoff to this story in the latest issue of the 'New Yorker' magazine.
It explores the loss of shipping containers at sea, something which we explore with Year 8 students as part of a unit on the geography of our stuff, and what it tells us about the world.
In 1990, when a container ship headed from Korea to the United States lost tens of thousands of Nike athletic shoes overboard, each one bearing a serial number, an oceanographer, Curtis Ebbesmeyer, asked beachcombers all over the world to report any that washed ashore. (Alongside the former BBC journalist Mario Cacciottolo, Ebbesmeyer collaborated with Tracey Williams on “Adrift.”) As it turns out, Nikes tolerate salt water well and will float pretty much until they run out of ocean—although, since the two shoes in a pair orient differently in the wind, one beach might be strewn with right sneakers while another is covered in left ones. Ebbesmeyer used the reported location of the shoes to pioneer a field that he calls “flotsametrics”: the study of ocean currents based on the drift patterns of objects that go overboard.
The excellent illustration is by Bianca Bagnarelli.
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