Scientific Serendipity over the Pacific

Serendipity can be defined as “Making fortuitous discoveries while looking for something unrelated” or “Luck, or good fortune, in finding something good accidentally.” Serendipity is not at all rare in science, and some past examples, such as the “discovery” of Teflon, will be given. In this paper it will be shown how a serendipitous typhoon in the central Pacific in the late 1970s led to some important scientific discoveries related to the transport of large quantities of Asian desert dust across and into the Pacific Ocean.