Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Our Main Man

We have Curtis Ebbesmeyer as our main contact. He was contacted by Charles Moore after he first found the Pacific Trash Vortex after a yacht race. Ebbesmeyer is an American oceanographer who graduated with a Phd at the University of Washington. He now studies the movement of flotsam in his retirement. His interest of ocean current movements was first carried out by dropping buoys into the ocean and tracking them. But in May 1990, the ship Hansa Carrier dropped a container containing eighty thousand Nike sneakers in to the ocean. He used this seemingly harmful circumstance and turned it into something productive by using those as buoys to monitor ocean currents. In this way, he can use trash as monitors and find out where the flotsam is going and its path. This helps cleanup crews more easily find where they need to focus their ships to. He now has a network of beachcombers who inform him of recent incidences of things falling into the ocean.

He uses OSCURS (Ocean Surface Currents Simulation), a computer simulator developed by Seattle oceanographer Jim Ingraham, to track the oceanic movement of all kinds of flotsam. Currently Mr. Ebbesmeyer is working with Evans-Hamilton Inc., an oceanography company that focuses on physical oceanography services, meteorological conditions, and application of marine and freshwater instrumentation.