If the Shoe Fits
Oceanographers are opportunists, and they admit it. For example, their reports often credit a "ship of opportunity" as a research platform. The term appropriately describes a suitable vessel slated to be in the right place at the right time (and with an owner willing) to serve some oceanographer's purpose.
Opportunity may even drive science, as shown by the work of Seattle-based researchers Curtis Ebbesmeyer and W. James Ingraham. They have taken advantage of a unique spill of opportunity---the world's greatest inadvertent launch of shoes.
In spring 1990, the container vessel Hansa Carrier encountered some rotten weather as she chugged westward across the North Pacific. On May 27, storm waves swept 21 containers from her decks. Five of those 40-foot containers held a shipment of Nikes---shoes for running, hiking, jogging; for men, women, children. Forty thousand pairs of shoes hit the sea at once.
No one knows how many of those shoes sank with their containers and how many broke free and floated away. But, since the shoes were not fastened into pairs, an oceanographer's best-case scenario offered 80,000 current tracers set loose in the Pacific at 48 degrees north latitude, 161 degrees west longitude.
By the end of 1990, beachcombers reported hundreds of shoes arriving on the Washington shore. By May 1991, a Seattle newspaper claimed thousands of shoes had landed along the coast. The oceanographers set about recruiting field workers of opportunity---the beachcombers who were gathering shoes and arranging swap meets to find mates for still-wearable if well-soaked Nikes.
Their most enthusiastic recruit was Oregon artist Steve McLeod, who quickly became chief shoe scout. Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham credit McLeod's contacts for providing about half their data. The other half came from what they describe as "media-spurred reports." Reporters found the project irresistible, and the Associated Press picked up the story and disseminated it widely. Not just any stranded Nike made an acceptable data point. Since there are many reasons for a shoe to be found at sea, the oceanographers limited their study to verified flotillas of washed-up shoes. They officially recorded only reports of a hundred or so Nikes found together at a time.
With those limitations, the oceanographers accepted only 1300 shoes as genuine current tracers from the shoe spill. This approximately 1.6 percent return would certainly seem paltry to the Nike company, or to its insurers, but is quite respectable in comparison with returns from more customary releases. For example, drift bottles tossed overboard at Ocean Station Papa (a point that the seaborne shoes would have passed on their way to North America) provided recoveries no higher than 6.2 percent and usually closer to 2 percent.
Although Alaska's Cold Bay was probably the town closest to the spill, no shoes headed there. Going with the flow, the shoes rode eastward in the current, diverging north and south only when they came close to North America. Nikes from the spill reached Canada's Vancouver Island by January 1991, and on March 26 of that year 250 shoes were found in the Queen Charlotte Islands. Apparently the Nikes were bound our way, but Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham reported no group of at least 100 shoes stranded on Alaska's coastline.
Probably the shoes sailed on by, held well offshore in the Alaska Current. Still, it's worth keeping watch. Apparently some shoes are still floating along in the circling waters. As Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham were readying their shoe-spill article for publication, they got word that more Nikes had turned up---on the north shore of the Big Island of Hawaii.
