Preface: A New World | p. xiii |
Chasing Water | p. 1 |
The shoe drops and a quest begins | |
Growing up near the sea but not on it | |
Chocolate and ducklings, Flotsam and Jetsam | |
An educational detour | |
Dance class and lifelong love | |
Escaping the draft and working for Big Oil | |
Hearing the oceanographic call | |
A boost from John D. Rockefeller | |
A mentor with a holistic approach to the sea | |
An aquatic snark hunt | |
Deadheads and Trident subs | |
Eulerian and Lagrangian viewpoints | |
Water bodies as granular and dynamic | |
Dabob Bay as oceanic microcosm | |
Oil and Icebergs | p. 18 |
Jim Ingraham creates the Ocean Surface Current Simulator | |
The UW gang fans out | |
Mobil Oil's first oceanographer | |
Conspiring to make Big Oil prepare for big waves | |
Cliff Barnes's war with icebergs and U-boats | |
Riders on the icy sea | |
Life on ice islands | |
North Sea perils | |
Goodbye, Dallas; hello, Seattle | |
Knocking on doors | |
Sewage grease balls and a devil's staircase | |
Akira Okubo, master of swarm mathematics | |
Daredevil drift reading on the Strait of Juan de Fuca | |
Chasing snarks with the Russians | |
An ocean full of eddies | |
Messages in Bottles | p. 45 |
My father's many illnesses | |
Our family is reunited in Seattle | |
Oil bust and near bankruptcy | |
Chasing the Gulf Stream's frontal eddies | |
The frustrations of environmental consulting | |
Low-tech drift sticks on Port Ludlow | |
The Vikings release the first ocean drifters and find new harbors | |
Yasuyori's wave-borne verse | |
The science of determinate drifters and the mystique of message bottles | |
Edgar Allan Poe, oceanographic seer | |
Guinness rules the waves | |
The czar's bottle | |
Gospel bombs and bottled salvation | |
I dedicate myself to drifters | |
Eureka, a Sneaker! | p. 70 |
The Great Sneaker Spill | |
Shippers stonewall, but Nike shares its secrets | |
The joy of beachcombing | |
OSCURS predicts the sneakers' path | |
Another spill: beavers, frogs, turtles, and ducks | |
Ducky mania | |
OSCURS aces another blind test | |
The tub toys round the Aleut Gyre | |
Pacific Pathways comes to Sitka | |
Oceanic wheels within wheels | |
An epic freedom drifter | |
Hockey gloves outrace sneakers | |
Wind and waves sort left from right | |
Why nature is two-sided | |
Coffins, Castaways, and Cadavers | p. 94 |
Four right feet | |
The float-away corpse | |
Ignoring the oil-spill omens | |
Dad's passing and the Beachcombers' Alert | |
Isis, Osiris, Moses, and Genghis | |
Freedom floaters and the Loop Current | |
Nelson Eddy, strikes. Freedom's price | |
Floaters and sinkers | |
Follow the shark | |
The mystery of Barnacle Bill | |
The dead don't stay down | |
I lose my sea legs | |
The Admiral of the Floating World | p. 118 |
Far-flung flotsam in the Mediterranean catch basin | |
Awakening to Columbus | |
How sea beans conquered the sea | |
The first flotsamologist | |
The Azores dumping ground | |
Messengers from "Cathay" | |
Invasion of the Finnmen | |
Reading the waters, not the maps | |
Phantom islands | |
Cross Creeks floating archipelago | |
Columbus's message in a barrel | |
Borne on a Black Current | p. 138 |
Ancient volcanic emigrants | |
The mighty Kuroshio sweeps them away | |
Asian infusions in America | |
Castaways from the hermit shogunate | |
Ranald MacDonald's bold mission to Japan | |
Wrecked junks at Malarrimo | |
The American Coastal Pathway | |
The Great Conveyor | p. 152 |
Ban beans, brick beads, and buoyant urns | |
One mystery leads to another | |
The forgotten gyres, rediscovered and renamed | |
Amos Wood follows the fishing floats | |
Buzzy's board rounds the gyre | |
Tracking water by standing still | |
Orbital periods | |
Handoffs between gyres | |
Wheels within watery wheels | |
The global conveyor belt | |
Ashes to Ashes, Life from the Sea | p. 171 |
Akira and Keiko, apart but inseparable | |
A young planet covered in floating rock | |
Pumice as primordial incubator | |
Akira and I broach our new theory of life's beginnings | |
Akira's end | |
A farewell feast | |
We flush Keiko out to sea | |
My parents join Akira and Keiko in the Turtle Gyre | |
Junk Beach and Garbage Patch | p. 186 |
Growing official and corporate indifference to marine environmental threats | |
Deaf ears and cold shoulders | |
Frustration and early retirement | |
How a garbage patch forms: Hadley cells and reverse hurricanes | |
Huxley and Mann on Rubber Beach | |
St. Paul's suffering fur seals | |
Collector beaches | |
Hawaiian convergence | |
How the islanders used the currents | |
We reach Junk Beach | |
Cleanups, pileups, and an unending washup | |
Charlie Moore's war on marine dumping | |
Turtle beach and plastic sea | |
The Synthetic Sea | p. 208 |
Plastic, born in mimicry | |
Pool balls and piano keys: seeking an ivory substitute | |
Plastic-packed albatrosses | |
Molecular mimicry | |
Endocrine disruptors and feminization | |
Nurdles sponge up greasy pollutants | |
Petroleum, plastic, lead, and mercury: which is worse? | |
Rat poison canisters at the Fun Fair | |
The Music of the Gyres | p. 222 |
The gyre orbits add up | |
Oceanic octaves, a global harmonic series | |
Melting the Arctic and speeding the gyres | |
Farewell, fundamental tone | |
Finding hope | |
Urban Legends of the Sea | p. 229 |
A Million Drifting Messages | p. 233 |
The Oceanic Gyres | p. 235 |
Ocean Memory | p. 236 |
Harmonics of the Gyres | p. 238 |
Acknowledgments | p. 240 |
Ilustration Credits | p. 242 |
Glossary | p. 243 |
Further Reading | p. 247 |
Index | p. 267 |
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