Ananova:

The first of 29,000 rubber ducks which have been circling the world's oceans for 15 years are expected to wash up on a British beach soon.

The ducks fell overboard from a container ship bound for Seattle from China in 1992, reports the BBC.

Their journey since has given scientists a valuable insight into surface currents as they have been far more widely reported than the floats scientists use.

"The ducks went around the North Pacific in three years - all the way from the spill site to Alaska, over to Japan and back to North America," said Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a retired oceanographer based in Seattle.

"This was twice as fast as the water at the surface - so I began to call them hyper-ducks."

The floating ducks are expected to wash up on the Cornish coast this summer, battered and bleached by their journey through the waters of the Arctic, the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

They have floated along the Alaskan coast, reaching the Bering Strait in 1995. It is thought they were trapped by slow moving ice for several years as it then took them until 2000 to reach the Atlantic ocean.

A year later, they were tracked in the area of the north Atlantic where the Titanic sank. Some broke away and headed for Europe, others have surfaced in Hawaii, Indonesia, Australia and South America.

Two children's books have been written about the toys which have become collectors' items, selling on eBay for £1,000.

Beachcombers will know whether these are the genuine rubber ducks as they will have the words "The First Years" stamped upon them.