Cars crossing the Pacific.

Thousands of toy cars and party balloons are currently floating across the Pacific Ocean and should wash up on North American shores just in time to celebrate the turn of the millennium, according to an oceanographer who tracks the path of flotsam around the world.

In his newsletter, Beachcombers' Alert, Curtis C. Ebbesmeyer reports that a hundred thousand miniature cars and a million balloons fell off a cargo ship south of Japan last January. Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographic consultant with Evans-Hamilton of Seattle, teamed up with W. James Ingraham Jr. of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle to investigate the fate of these objects. Ingraham used a computer model of winds and ocean currents to forecast where these pieces will head if they remain afloat. According to the simulation, the objects should drift almost due east across the ocean, reaching Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia by January of the year 2000.

Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham have previously had success predicting the movements of sneakers, plastic bathtub toys, and hockey gloves that floated across parts of the Pacific. They've also had failures, notes Ebbesmeyer. In 1996, the University of Washington in Seattle lost an unmanned research submersible at sea and turned to Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham for help. The oceanographers modeled where the sub might go, but it was never found, he says.