Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer who later became affiliated with Utrecht University and who had built a debris-tracking website, offered a complementary analysis. His site, adrift.org.au, modeled the movement of floating objects in the Pacific based on observed current patterns. Objects starting off the western Mexican coast, his model showed, would typically reach the Marshall Islands in fourteen to twenty months — a window that encompasses the 438-day duration Alvarenga reported. The trade winds that drive surface circulation in the tropical Pacific are some of the strongest current-generators in the world, and they move westward. A boat without a motor, caught in those currents, would go west.
Van Sebille made an additional point that illuminates what would have happened if Alvarenga had not reached Ebon Atoll: without the islands as a stopping point, the boat would have continued west and then been caught in the large circular current system of the North Pacific, eventually being pulled into the North Pacific Garbage Patch — the vast accumulation of marine debris that circulates in the ocean’s subtropical gyre. A boat that missed the Marshall Islands would probably not have fetched up anywhere for a very long time.
The oceanographic evidence doesn’t verify every detail of Alvarenga’s account. It cannot confirm what he ate, what he did, what happened to Córdoba, or any of the specific events of the drift. What it does confirm is that the overall trajectory — a boat leaving the Mexican Pacific coast in November 2012 and drifting to the Marshall Islands in January 2014 — is consistent with observed ocean circulation patterns and is not physically implausible. The currents that were running during that period could have carried a boat on that route in approximately that time.