Following the jetsam

Oceanographer Ebbesmeyer (with amanuensis Scigliano) explains how the observation of beach debris reveals oceanic drift, and can contribute to biology, ecology and climatology. When science goes right, we discover how mid-ocean spills of hockey gloves or rubber ducks enhance oceanographic understanding; why an increasing number of single feet are bobbing around in the sea (buoyant athletic shoes encourage feet to detach themselves from corpses); or how Columbus knew he'd arrived at the New World by spying "sea beans" on the beach.

The book is as much genial personal memoir as pop-oceanography exposition, but there is a particularly interesting chapter on "Messages in Bottles", which credits Edgar Allan Poe (in his 1833 story "MS Found in a Bottle") with starting a craze for chucking bottled communications to the tides (a sort of slow and waterlogged version of Facebook). Poe might not have approved of the hundreds of thousands of evangelical "gospel bombs" that apparently litter the waters now, but he might have been proud to have inspired the use of messages in bottles as a scientific means of tracking current affairs.