In the opening to their new book Flotsametrics and the Floating World, authors Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano describe how on May 27, 1990, some 61,820 sneakers floated to the surface of the North Pacific:
These high-seas drifters offer a new way of looking at the seas, their movements, and, as we shall see, their music. Call it “flotsametrics.” It’s led me to a world of beauty, order, and peril I could not have imagined even after decades as a working oceanographer — the floating world.
Chapter excerpt at nytimes.com.