A Scottish skipper pulled something from his nets near the Shetland Islands last April, it wasn’t prince Namor or a mermaid. It was the oldest message in the bottle and it was 98 years old.
Photograph courtesy Marine Scotland
This read the message:
“Please state where and when this card was found, and then put it in the nearest Post Office. You will be informed in reply where and when it was set adrift. Our object is to find out the direction of the deep currents of the North Sea.”
The message in a bottle found by Andrew Leaper—certified by Guinness World Records on August 30 as the oldest ever recovered—belonged to a century-old science experiment. Capt. C. Hunter Brown of the Glasgow School of Navigation set bottle number 646B adrift, along with 1,889 others, on June 10, 1914, to study local ocean currents.
Found in a bottle set adrift 98 years ago, this document was part of an ocean-current study
“Drift bottles gave oceanographers at the start of the last century important information that allowed them to create pictures of the patterns of water circulation in the seas around Scotland,” Marine Scotland Science’s Bill Turrell explained in a statement.
Oddly enough, the previous record which dated back to 1917, was set in 2006 by a friend of Leaper’s, Mark Anderson, who was sailing the same ship, the Copious. ”It was an amazing coincidence,” Leaper said in a statement. “It’s like winning the lottery twice.”
Today drift bottles are still used by oceanographers studying global currents. In 2000 Eddy Carmack, a climate researcher at Canada’s Institute of Ocean Science, started the Drift Bottle Project, initially to study currents around northern North America.
In the past 12 years, he and his colleagues have launched some 6,400 bottled messages from ships around the world. Of those, 264—about 4 percent—have been found and reported.
“There have been some amazing paths followed by these bottles,” Carmack said.
Three that were dropped into the Beaufort Sea, above northern Alaska and northwestern Canada, became frozen in sea ice, he said. Five years later, melting Arctic ice had flushed the bottles all the way to northern Europe. Another bottle circled Antarctica one and a half times before it wound up on the Australian island of Tasmania. Some have made it from Mexico to the Philippines. And others have demonstrated that oil spills and debris from development in Canada’s Labrador Sea and Baffin Bay could end up on Irish, French, Scottish, and Norwegian beaches.
But there’s more to the project than science, Carmack said. “The main thing about this study is that it connects people with the currents of the ocean,” he said. “We find that we are only a bottle drop away from our neighbors around the world.”
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