Michelangelo Buonarroti depicted the passage between the divine and the human in a fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. This connection is translated into a gap of space between the fingers of the human being, represented by Adam, and those of his Creator. Some versions suggest that the image surrounding God resembles the shape of a brain. Adam, in turn, is given over to torpor, barely extending his left arm, and, with an indolent index finger, awaits a sublime touch to awaken him to his own consciousness.
Others see in it a womb, in which the near-touch translates the imminence of humanity's birth. Whatever the case, I've always kept this image, commissioned by Pope Julius II, analogous to the Bering Strait. That's right. Look at the world map: a channel about 90 km long that connects the Arctic Ocean, through part of the Chukchi Sea, and the Pacific Ocean, through the Bering Sea. These kilometers are nothing on a planetary scale, making Asia and the Americas almost touch. There is a hypothesis that advocates this strait as a bridge for human migration to what is now Alaska and from there southward across the continent.
Unlike the cherubs surrounding God in the Sistine Chapel, a character inhabiting the seas of Chucky and Bering is the * Odobenus rosmarus divergens* , known as the Pacific walrus. A large, mustachioed creature weighing well over a ton, it survives in that icy environment on a diet of mollusks and ducklings. Oops. There are no ducklings in the Bering Strait, not even as a Sistine synapse. Well, the imagination that allows us to daydream quickly brings to mind a yellowish rubber duckling embedded in one of the long tusks of a walrus, whose roars don't betray the presence of a polar bear, but cry out for a dentist-veterinarian. Okay, it might not be a duckling, but a turtle, beaver, or a rubber frog with a cavity in that colossal tooth.
While there may be limits to fantasy, the same cannot be said for the fate of these toys, produced in Chinese factories and destined to float in American bathtubs. These sensory toys ended up in the Bering Strait between 1995 and 1996, due to an accident involving a cargo ship en route from Hong Kong to the United States in January 1992. A storm caused a container with 7.200 boxes to be launched into the North Pacific. The waves may have broken the seals of the transport container, separating the toys from the cardboard boxes and leaving 7.200 blue turtles, 7.200 green frogs, 7.200 red beavers, and 7.200 yellow ducklings adrift in the saltwater. 28.800 rubber pieces were also adrift in the ocean. They were drawn in by ocean currents near the North Pacific subtropical gyre. The following year, ducklings were found in Japan, and several of them took the Alaska/Aleutian Current, landing in both Alaska and the Canadian coast. Others were left to their fate between California and Hawaii, in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, characterized by a kind of dispersed concentration of debris, largely microplastics, fishing nets, and yellow ducklings. Some of these landed in the Bering Strait, trapped in its glaciers, like a discreet brushstroke by Michelangelo, pointing to the imperfection of humankind. They sailed across the Arctic, witnessing its melting ice. They crossed the channel separating Russia and the United States and arrived, between 2000 and 2003, on the east coast of North America and the north coast of Iceland.
In 2022, a frog was recorded in Scotland. In 2024, in the South Pacific, a blue turtle in Australia. The drunken trajectory, yes, a drunken or random stroll, whose conditional probability points only to past displacement without predicting what happens in the next step, or swim, in the case of the rubber ducks. The crossing of the Arctic to Greenland, the route from the Atlantic to Europe. Ocean currents of the North Pacific, California, North Equatorial, and others that dispersed and probably still disperse rubber ducks contributed to large-scale experiments without any intention or planning, contributing to a more accurate understanding of ocean currents, the melting of the polar ice cap, and marine pollution. This is without mentioning the economic incentive of profiting from the ducks, since they became part of auctions as valuable collector's items.
The case of the ducklings was not an isolated incident of containers being thrown into the sea as a consequence of a storm in the North Pacific. In 1990, the cargo ship Hansa Carrier lost around 80.000 pairs of sneakers, which hitched a ride on ocean currents and ended up on the beaches of Alaska, British Columbia, and Washington. Frogs, turtles, beavers, ducklings, and sneakers, acting as tracers, have helped scientists map ocean currents and improve mathematical models of marine dispersion, including theorizing the fluid dynamics of garbage islands, in which currents converge and spiral inward, accumulating what floats on the surface of the water, creating a strange pool of garbage in the middle of the ocean. In order to understand the formation of such polluting islands and to observe the polar ice melt, it cannot be forgotten that the North Pacific, the Bering Strait, and Greenland arouse the interests of powerful nations, whether for economic or military reasons.
It should be mentioned that rubber ducks are the result of a third-generation processing industry within the petrochemical sector, which uses petroleum as the basic matrix for the first-generation industry. Before that, however, the story of the ducks evokes their amorphous mass, a fossilized remnant of life, traversing narrow passages, enclosed within the bowels of oil tankers, signaling how much humanity must be attentive to the distinction between progress and regression of civilization, and thus have the necessary strength to raise its index finger and touch the divine face.
This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Unicamp.
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