APRIL 19, 2012 -- More than a year and thousands of miles later, a soccer ball washed away during the Japan tsunami has turned up on a remote Alaskan island and eventually could be headed back to the Japanese school grounds it originally came from.
http://response.restoration.noaa.gov/about/media/japanese-soccer-ball-lost-during-tsunami-washes-alaska.html
**UPDATE (4/24/2012): The soccer ball's owner, 16 year-old Misaki Murakami, has been located and confirmed that this is indeed his ball. He lost everything in the 2011 Japan tsunami and is grateful that this object of sentimental value has been found. He received it in 2005 as a gift from his classmates in third grade before moving to a new elementary school, and one of the messages on the ball reads "Good luck, Murakami!!" (or rather "Hang in there, Murakami!!"). David Baxter and his wife Yumi plan to send him the soccer ball. The volleyball found on the same Alaskan island a few weeks later has been traced to a 19 year-old woman, Shiori Sato, whose home was washed away in the Japan tsunami.
After the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck Japan on March 11, 2011, tons of debris was swept into the Pacific. Much of it is buoyant enough to float on the surface and can be moved around by small scale currents and large scale circulation patterns, such as the North Pacific Gyre. The gyre, bounded by the Kuroshio Current on the west, California Current on the east, and Equatorial Current on the south tends to entrain debris in the center of the Pacific basin, creating what is commonly known as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch." Though the bulk of the marine debris remains in the ocean for years in an area north of Hawaii, individual pieces are continually washing up on the continental and island shores that border the basin. NOAA's Marine Debris Program leads efforts to track and remove much of this existing trash, and is currently assessing the tsunami debris.
Scientists as NOAA's Earths System Research Laboratory developed the debris dispersion model, shown here. Using five years of historical weather patterns, the model is used to approximate how debris will circulate across the basin.
