‘Message in a bottle’ travelled nearly 8,000 kilometres

Message in a bottle’ travelled nearly 8,000 kilometres  


On June 9, fourth-class students from St Joseph’s NS, Ballinrobe,  were on a school tour at Carrowniskey Beach, Louisburgh. While surfing, two students, John Crumlish (pictured) and Eoin Langan, found a bottle with a message inside. The message was part of a drift bottle project from the Institute of Ocean Sciences in Canada.
Ms Cunnane, the class teacher, made contact with the institute. She gave them the bottle number and the discovery location to Sarah Zimmermann, who confirmed that this was, indeed, a remarkable discovery.
This bottle was first launched in the Arctic Ocean, north of Canada and the US. The institute was conducting ocean studies on a big icebreaker for the month of August 2006 and were dropping these drift bottles along their track. This bottle was dropped at one of their science stations where the ocean was 70 per cent covered with sea-ice.  So not only did this little bottle survive being in the ocean for five years, for three or four of those years it would have been in arctic sea-ice. 
What path did it take? Well, the bottle could have come out of the Arctic on the east side of Greenland (Fram Strait), or it could have come out on the west side of Greenland, travelled south and then gone east on the Gulf Stream. The bottle would have travelled 7,829 kilometres in total – an average of 4.4km/day.
No other bottle launched by the institute has travelled from the Arctic out to the Atlantic. While the path itself is not farfetched, the fact that it survived and was actually found is remarkable.