I'm finally catching up on some of the things I wanted to write about months ago.

I took this picture of plastic trash on the beach in Flamingo Inlet, a remote bay on the west coast of the Queen Charlottte Islands (Haida Gwaii), in July, 2009. I was dismayed to see so much trash in the wilderness and assumed it meant that ships passing the islands were dumping their trash. But I just read Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man's Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science by Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano and learned that sources of the trash in such a remote place may be more distant than I assumed. For information about the book, go to Flotsametrics.com..

Flotsametrics shows how Ebbesmeyer used flotsam from containers that fell off ships to chart the course of ocean currents, starting with masses of sneakers that washed up on ocean beaches in Oregon but spilled from a ship enroute from Korea to Los Angeles off the Aleutians Islands. The sneakers didn't just come ashore once; batches of them landed on the beach every three years as they circled the ocean over and over again. The circulating flotsam forms garbage patches in the middle of the ocean. In 2009 scientists were looking for sailors to chart the locations of these garbage patches. Check this website for more information: http://beachcombersalert.blogspot.com/