[originaltext]M: Hey, Michelle. Look what I just found. Right here in the sand.

M: Hey, Michelle. Look what I just found. Right here in the sand.
W: A piece of wood? Oh. Driftwood. Interesting shape... Almost like some sort of modern sculpture.
M: Yeah. And feel how smooth it is.
W: Hmm, Must’ve been in the water a long time. It could’ve been drifting in the ocean currents for months, or even years.
M: In the currents? Doesn’t the wind just blow things around out there?
W: Well, sure. But the currents are always moving, too. Almost like rivers, but underwater rivers, flowing through the ocean.
M: So how do they find out where these currents go? Stick a message in a bottle and throw it in the water?
W: Don’t laugh. In fact, I was reading in a science magazine that oceanographers have released huge numbers of bottles into the ocean over the years. They wanted to map out where the currents would carry them.
M: Say, I’ll bet-after they found out where all those bottles ended up-they could enter all that data in to a computer and make a pretty detailed model to... to show where the currents go.
W: In fact, they did. And they also found a neat way to test that model. There was a freighter carrying sneakers from a factory in Asia. It was caught in a big storm and thousands of pairs of sneakers got dumped in the Pacific Ocean.
M: Really? What a waste!
W: Yeah. Turns out, though, that hundreds of these shoes started washing up on beaches somewhere near Seattle, just about where the computer models had predicted the currents would carry them.
M: Gee. You mean all that stuff I find on the beaches might be part of some big scientific experiment? I thought it was all just trash!