Slashdot Log In
Rubber Duckies For Global Warming Research
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Nov 16, 2008 08:51 PM
from the next-time-try-penguins dept.
from the next-time-try-penguins dept.
The Wall Street Journal has a look at global warming research using rubber duckies. The toys have been employed in tracking ocean currents since 1992; but recently NASA robotics expert Alberto Behar released 90 yellow rubber ducks into the melt water flowing down a chasm in a Greenland glacier. "Each duck was imprinted with an email address and, in three languages, the offer of a reward. If all goes well, Dr. Behar hopes that one day they will emerge 30 miles or so away at the glacier's edge in the open water of Disko Bay near Ilulissat, bobbing brightly amid the icebergs north of the Arctic Circle, each one a significant clue to just how warming temperatures may speed the glacier's slide to the sea."
Related Stories
[+]
Science: Thousands of Rubber Ducks to Finally End Journey 210 comments
Bert de Jong writes "The Daily Mail reports that thousands of rubber ducks who have traveled the seas of the world since 1992 are about to end their journey. After escaping out of a container fallen off a Chinese freight ship in a storm, scientists have been followed them on their fifteen year trek. This has turned out to be an invaluable source of information for studying ocean currents. Now it seems inevitable though that they will finally land on the shores of South-West England. '[Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer] correctly predicted what many thought was impossible - that thousands of them would end up washed into the Arctic ice near Alaska, and then move at a mile a day, frozen in the pack ice, around their very own North-West Passage to the Atlantic. It proved true years later and in 2003, the first Friendly Floatees were found, frozen and then thawed out, on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. and Canada. So precious to science are they that the US firm that made them is offering a £50 bounty for finding one.'"
[+]
Idle: 130,000 Inflatable Breasts Have Been Lost At Sea 5 comments
pomke writes "According to WAtoday, 'More than 130,000 inflatable breasts have been lost at sea en route to Australia.
Men's magazine Ralph was planning to include the boobs as a free gift with its January issue.
The cargo is worth about $200,000, which is another blow for publisher ACP's parent company PBL, which is already in $4.3 billion of debt.'
I wonder if they could be used for Global Warming Research?"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Dupe (Score:5, Informative)
Irony. (Score:5, Funny)
Raise your hand if the prospect of an environmentalist dumping plastic into the ocean for research purposes is deeply amusing.
Rubber duckie, you're the one. (Score:5, Funny)
Rubber duckie, you're so fun.
Re:Rubber duckie, you're the one. (Score:5, Funny)
You make bathtime lots of fun. Rubber ducky I'm awfully fond of you. Too bad I must now go litter our oceans with your cute little yellow non-biodegradable petroleum product carcasses.
Parent
Great idea, it's happened before by accident (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure this is where he got the idea.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-464768/Thousands-rubber-ducks-land-British-shores-15-year-journey.html
Re:Great idea, it's happened before by accident (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed, it was a shipment of such bath tub toys washed overboard in the Pacific during a 1992 storm that accidentally launched this unusual field.
Parent
What do they expect to prove with this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What do they expect to prove with this? (Score:4, Interesting)
How long it takes is rather important.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In that case, they probably wouldn't learn much about glacier melt, but they could learn something about the ocean currents in the region.
Re:What do they expect to prove with this? (Score:5, Interesting)
They're not only wondering where the water goes, but how long it takes to get there and where it goes after that.
If they all come out at once then we know the routes they all took about the same route, or the routes they took were all more or less direct. If they emerge over years or even decades then we know some are becoming trapped, only to be released later. What if a duck washes up in India, twelve years after it was released in Greenland?
They're interested in knowing *everything* that could happen to these ducks after they're released. Furthermore, data from this experiment could confirm or falsify other oceanographic theories, all for $200 worth of rubber ducks.
Parent
This is showmanship, not science (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Spam begets research begets spam (Score:5, Funny)
"This duck was lost by a Nigerian prince. Email this address to claim your reward."
Reward (Score:5, Funny)
Has made apperances on childrens television shows
Please report any information on the whereabouts on Rubber Duckie to Ernie, Sesame St NY. +123 (456) 789-10-11-12
Cash reward
Next month's story (Score:5, Funny)
Scientists are extremely alarmed over a new phenomenon recently observed in the arctic glaciers. Melt water, which normally flows through micro rivers deep in the glacier until it reaches the sea, has started to flow over the surface instead, accelerating the rate at which the ice melts. "It's like something went and plugged up the flow, and now it's backing up like a giant toilet with a rubber duck stuck in it." remarked one researcher.
The researchers are currently seeking a $10 million grant to investigate the cause of this disturbing event.
Re:GPS tracker anyone? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:GPS tracker anyone? (Score:4, Funny)
Embed a hit single from Mariah Carrey in each one. Let the RIAA find them.
Parent
Re:GPS tracker anyone? (Score:4, Informative)
The article says he already tried a GPS tracker, and it failed to report in. I suppose he figured that rather than continuing to toss in expensive devices, he'd try a larger number of cheaper objects. If nobody finds them, at least it wasn't a big waste of money.
By the way, there are already robot floats in the ocean which can be tracked to show ocean currents (ARGO). Most of them don't use GPS, though, but Doppler radio tracking (here [argos-system.org]).
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:NASA's shoddy (fraudulent?) work (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's publish the rubber duckies for Global Warming Research and ignore Goddard Institute for Space Studies of NASA headed by James Hansen which published falsified data.
I hate to break it to you, but making a clerical mistake is not the same as "falsifying data".
This is simply another proof that the mainstream media is no longer interested in facts or reporting unbiased news
Uh, no, it's a sign that quickly-fixed data reporting errors which have no impact on any major climate studies are not front page news.
I also hate to break it to you, but minor errors are found and fixed in scientific data sets all the time. It's only news when the data error is the basis for some important scientific conclusion. (That has been the case, for instance, with the XBT ocean thermometers and the UAH satellite data.)
Your post is a prime example of how ridiculously polarized the global warming debate has become. You're grasping at straws, man. A mistake in two month's data reporting, which has nothing to do with James Hansen personally, is not a global scientific conspiracy nor a disproof of global warming.
just like during the election of the Anointed One
Anointed One? Yeah, you really sound like an impartial arbiter of scientific accuracy. You might want to tone down the hypocrisy while whinging about "bias".
Parent
Re:NASA's shoddy (fraudulent?) work (Score:5, Insightful)
how ridiculously polarized the global warming debate has become
Quite true. Personally I've become nearly apathetic upon the realization that both sides exaggerate to the point of dishonesty. Well, really it's the extremists on either side that do the lying, but since the issue is so polarized there's the illusion (perhaps becoming reality) that they speak for their respective groups.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You don't understand. The glacier is melting at 0.2 ducks per year! Prior to this experiment, the glacier was melting at zero ducks per year. It has increased 2 whole ducks per 10 year period! At this rate of increase, the entire population of ducks will be exhausted by 2142! Don't you care about the ducks?
The only upside is that, barring any additional interference, the glacier's melting will return to zero ducks per year once all the ducks are gone.
Re:NASA's shoddy (fraudulent?) work (Score:5, Informative)
About the author of this opinion article:
He has claimed that Asbestos is "chemically identical to talcum powder", and the BBC has accused him of basing his reputation on "lies about his credentials, unaccredited tests, and self aggrandisement".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Booker#Criticism [wikipedia.org]
He is not a credible person.
Parent
Re:Pollution Anyone? (Score:4, Funny)
Now lets all calm down, nobody here needs to gain any knowledge.
Parent
No phishing here (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Saving the world (Score:4, Insightful)
Using dollars is not a good metric. Food production is heavily subsidized; the price you pay for food at the grocery store in no way represents its actual costs to produce. (And it gets even worse when you try to take into account the externalities of food production that are allowed to be placed on the public without recompense -- the runoff from farms into water supplies and the Gulf, for one example.)
A better way is to look at energy and calories. The exact values depend on the food, your location, and other factors, but it's not atypical for 1 calorie of food energy to use over 100 calories of petroleum energy in its creation, transportation, packaging, and retail sale. If you buy nothing but raw foods at farmers' markets, the number will of course be lower, but even something as innocent as iceberg lettuce can have a huge energy debt. Michael Pollan does an analysis in one of his books, and if you are on the East Coast, eating lettuce from California, it's something like 4500 cal of petroleum for the measly 80 cal of human-consumable energy in the lettuce. It's much worse for heavily-processed foods.
I am a big proponent of bicycling, but it's not necessarily as obvious a win on carbon-emission grounds as it might appear. There are lots of other good reasons to bike, though. (To name a few, it decreases urban air pollution, which leads to health problems that consume resources, same also with obesity-related issues, if widely adopted it would make the roads safer, etc.)
I think of it as a "healthy / pleasant lifestyle" choice, rather than an "environmental" choice. You cannot claim to be much of an environmentalist while leading a resource-intensive, Western lifestyle. It simply cannot be done. Even the most "environmentally conscious," bike-riding, CFL-using, Prius-owning, self-righteous neo-hippies are contributing massively to the problem, practically just by getting up in the morning. You cannot eat, drink, shit, or die in America and not be contributing to the problem in some way. (You can't really even kill yourself without incurring a debt, since the way we deal with dead bodies is, in itself, not exactly environmentally sound. Although that's probably the most un-hypocritical approach.)
The truth is that individual choices matter very little in the grand scheme. If you drive an efficient vehicle, or ride a bike, great -- that's slightly less demand for gasoline, slightly lower prices, and slightly more gas for someone else to put in their Hummer (or someone in India to fuel their shiny new Tata). It's still getting pumped out of the ground as fast as we can find it either way. Our civilization is going to hurtle down the road it's going down, until it runs into something Really Bad -- maybe global warming, maybe Peak Oil, maybe something else -- and either engineers a clever way around it, or collapses in an orgy of suffering and death like nothing history has ever recorded. Whether or not you rode a bike to work won't change the outcome in the slightest.
It might make you feel a lot better, though, in the meantime. That's why I do it, and why I'd tell anyone they should as well.
Parent