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Storm waves over 20m high are getting bigger, more frequent and eroding Britain's Atlantic coast, experts say. The waves rip huge boulders from cliff faces and sweep them up to 50m inland in exposed areas such as Shetland, Orkney and the Western Isles.

Tests on major brands of bottled water have found that nearly all of them contained tiny particles of plastic. In the largest investigation of its kind, 250 bottles bought in nine different countries were examined.

Friendly Floatees are plastic rubber ducks marketed by The First Years, and made famous by the work of Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer who models ocean currents on the basis of flotsam movements.

A container filled with millions of Lego pieces fell into the sea off Cornwall in 1997. But instead of remaining at the bottom of the ocean, they are still washing up on Cornish beaches today - offering an insight into the mysterious world of oceans and tides.

They were toys destined only to bob up and down in nothing bigger than a child's bath - but so far they have floated halfway around the world. The armada of 29,000 plastic yellow ducks, blue turtles and green frogs broke free from a cargo ship 15 years ago.

Theirs is an epic tale of resilience and pluck, a seafarer's yarn of high-seas adventure that has seen them brave some of the world's wildest waters in their 11-year odyssey from the Pacific Ocean toward landfall in Europe.

Scientists are investigating ways of dealing with the millions of tonnes of floating plastic rubbish that is accumulating in our oceans. They are a quirk of ocean currents - a naturally created vortex known as a gyre - where floating rubbish tends to accumulate.

Almost a year after the Japanese Tohoku earthquake and mega-tsunami, the Pacific Ocean is still dealing with the consequences of the catastrophe. Most of it headed eastwards, according to modelling work by the Hawaii-based International Pacific Research Center.

A consignment of thousands of rubber ducks is expected to wash up any day on the coast of New England - after more than a decade at sea.

AVON, Mass. -- July 14, 2003 -- It's a boat, it's a buoy, it's a... RUBBER DUCK?! Beachgoers in New England may be spotting more than shells on the shore this summer. Any day now, a flock of rubber ducks could waddle their way onto area beaches. The ducks have had a long journey.

Any day now, five-centimetre-high plastic ducks may start washing ashore in New England, on the United States east coast, 11 years after a container filled with 29,000 bathtub toys toppled from a cargo ship's deck into the north Pacific.

Plastic duckies, often referred to as "rubber duckies" in the press, have been floating in the ocean ever since 1992 when they were liberated from a container which was lost from a ship due to high seas. The process is closely monitored by Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer.

A boat made of 12,000 plastic bottles has set sail on a voyage from San Francisco to Sydney to spread awareness about pollution in the world's oceans.Environmentalist and banking heir David De Rothschild and a crew set out on the appropriately named Plastiki catamaran.

US researchers, writing in Science, suggest the volume of plastic appeared to have peaked in recent years. One reason could be tighter marine pollution rules that prevent vessels dumping their waste at sea.

The Gulf Stream does not appear to be slowing down, say US scientists who have used satellites to monitor tell-tale changes in the height of the sea. Confirming work by other scientists using different methodologies, they found dramatic short-term variability but no longer-term trend.

In 1903, 3,000 teddy bears were sent by ship from Germany to America only for them to disappear. Some claim the bears were the first ever made and would now be the most valuable in the world. So what happened to them?

The Great Pacific garbage patch (also Pacific trash vortex) is a garbage patch, a gyre of marine debris particles, in the central North Pacific Ocean. It is located roughly from 135°W to 155°W and 35°N to 42°N.

Tiny pieces of plastic and man-made fibres are causing contamination of the world's oceans and beaches, the journal Science has reported. Even remote and apparently pristine layers of sand and mud are now composed partly of this microscopic rubbish, broken down from discarded waste.

Around Antarctica, the total amount of debris is low, but the proportion of it due to humans is very high. The continent could be at particular risk from alien species floating in because of a double threat from global warming and a lack of alternative habitats for many of its species.

Curtis Ebbesmeyer is an oceanographer who tracks currents in the sea by studying what gets washed up where. He's calculated the trainers moved more than 450 miles in a month - up to 18 miles a day.