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