Shoe spill in the North Pacific

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Approximately 80,000 Nike brand shoes were lost overboard on May 27, 1990, in the north Pacific Ocean (˜48°N; 161°W; Figure 2). Six months to a year later, thousands of shoes washed ashore in North America from southern Oregon to the Queen Charlotte Islands. Figure 1 shows six shoes found on the beach. We have gathered beachcomber reports and compared the inferred shoe drift with an oceanographic hindcast model and historical drift bottle returns. This spill‐of‐ opportunity provided a calibration point for the model; computer runs for 1946–1991 suggested that drift of floatable material across the northeast Pacific Ocean for May 1990–January 1991 was farther south than the mean of the forty‐five simulations.