This bottle and its contents (sample postcard and insert shown above) were launched in 1959 by the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey and were found in 2013.
A message in a bottle (abbrev. MIB[2]) is a form of communication in which a message is sealed in a container (typically a bottle) and released into a conveyance medium (typically a body of water).
Messages in bottles have been used to send distress messages, in crowdsourced scientific studies of ocean currents, as memorial tributes, to send deceased loved ones' ashes on a final journey, to convey expedition reports, and to carry letters or reports from those believing themselves to be doomed. Invitations to prospective pen pals and letters to actual or imagined love interests have also been sent as messages in bottles.
The lore surrounding messages in bottles has often been of a romantic or poetic nature.
Use of the term "message in a bottle" has expanded to include metaphorical uses or uses beyond its traditional meaning as bottled messages released into oceans. The term has been applied to plaques on craft launched into outer space, interstellar radio messages, stationary time capsules, balloon mail, and containers storing medical information for use by emergency medical personnel.
With a growing awareness that bottles constitute waste that can harm the environment and marine life, environmentalists tend to favor biodegradable drift cards[3] and wooden blocks.[4]
History and uses
Bottled messages may date to about 310 B.C., in water current studies reputed[5] to have been carried out by Greek philosopher Theophrastus.[6] The Japanese medieval epic The Tale of the Heike records the story of an exiled poet who, in about 1177 A.D., launched wooden planks on which he had inscribed poems describing his plight.[7] In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I reputedly created an official position of "Uncorker of Ocean Bottles", and—thinking some bottles might contain secrets from British spies or fleets—decreed that anyone else opening the bottles could face the death penalty.[6][8] (However, it has been argued that this is a myth[9].) In the nineteenth century, literary works such as Edgar Allan Poe's 1833 "MS. Found in a Bottle" and Charles Dickens' 1860 "A Message from the Sea" inspired an enduring popular passion for sending bottled messages.[10]
Floating wood-and-metal "drift casks" launched from northern Alaska in 1899-1901 reached Siberia, Iceland and Norway, becoming the first human-made objects to transit the Northwest Passage.[11]
This 1960s-era seabed drifter includes a descending ballast stem to allow a more buoyant disk to remain just above the seabed to be carried by bottom currents. An imprinted message offers a small reward for reporting the time and place the drifter was found.[12]
Scientific experiments involving drift objects—more generally called determinate drifters[13]—provide information about currents and help researchers develop ocean circulation maps.[12] For example, experiments conducted in the mid-1700s by Benjamin Franklin and others indicated the existence and approximate location of the Gulf Stream, with scientific confirmation following in the mid-1800s.[3] Using a network of beachcomber informants, rear admiral Alexander Becher is believed to be the first (from 1808–1852) to study travel of so-called "bottle papers" around an ocean gyre (a large circulating current system).[10] In the late 1800s, Albert I, Prince of Monaco determined that the Gulf Stream branched into the North Atlantic Drift and the Azores Current.[14] In the 1890s, Scottish scientist T. Wemyss Fulton released floating bottles and wooden slips to chart North Sea surface currents for the first time.[15] Releasing bottles designed to remain a short distance above the sea bed, British marine biologist George Parker Bidder III first proved in the early twentieth century that deep sea currents flowed from east to west in the North Sea[16] and that bottom feeders prefer to move against the current.[17]
The United States Coast and Geodetic Survey (USC&GS) used drift bottles from 1846 to 1966.[1] More recently, technologies involving satellite tags, fixed current profilers and satellite communication have permitted more efficient analysis of ocean currents: at any given time, thousands of modern "drifters" transmit current position, temperature, velocity, etc., to satellites, thus avoiding conventional drift bottles' dependence on serendipitous finds and cooperation by conscientious citizens.[18]
Drift bottle studies have provided a simple way to learn about non-tidal movement of waters containing eggs and larvae of commercially important fishes, for sharing among fisheries scientists and oceanographers.[12] Such experiments simulate the travel of pollutants[17] such as oil spills,[3] study formation of ocean gyre "garbage patches",[17] and suggest travel paths of invasive species.[3] Persistent currents are detected to allow ships to ride favorable currents and avoid opposing currents.[19] Projected travel paths of navigation hazards, such as naval mines, advise safer shipping routes.[19] Even in inland waterways, drifters wirelessly deliver real-time data on water quality, GPS location, and water velocity, for early warning against flash floods, measuring pollution run-off, and monitoring algal blooms.[20]
Outside science, people have launched bottled messages to find pen pals,[21] "bottle preachers"[22] have sent "sermon bottles",[23]propaganda-bearing bottles have been directed at foreign shores,[24][21][25][26] and survivors have sent poetic loving tributes to departed loved ones[27] or sent their cremated remains (ashes) on a final journey.[28][29]
It was estimated in 2009 that since the mid-1900s, six million bottled messages had been released, including 500,000 from oceanographers.[30]
Bottle design and recovery rates
Some bottles are ballasted with dry sand so that they float vertically at or near the ocean surface, and are less influenced by winds and breaking waves than other bottles that are purposely not ballasted.[12] Wooden blocks float higher in the water and thus are more influenced by wind—a design specially suited for simulating travel paths of plastic waste that is less dense than glass containers.[4]
An early-20th-century "bottom" (or seabed) drift bottle design by George Parker Bidder III involved weighting a bottle with a long copper wire that causes it to sink until the wire trails upon the sea bottom, at which time the bottle tends to remain a few inches above the bottom to be moved by the bottom current.[31] A mushroom-shaped seabed drifter design has also been used.[12] Seabed drifters are designed to be scooped up by a trawler or wash up on shore.[6]
Water pressure pressing on the cork or other closure was thought to keep a bottle better sealed;[6] some designs included a wooden stick to stop the cork from imploding.[12] Vessels of less scientific designs have survived for extended periods, including a baby food bottle[32] a ginger beer bottle,[33] and a 7-Up bottle.[34]
A low percentage of bottles—thought by some to be less than 3 percent—are actually recovered, so they are released in large numbers, sometimes in the thousands.[3] Reported recovery rates for large-scale scientific studies vary based on the ocean of release, and range from 11 percent (Woods Hole, 156,276 bottles from 1948 to 1962, Atlantic), to 10 percent (Woods Hole, 165,566 bottles from 1960 to 1970, Atlantic), to 3.4 percent (Scripps Institution, 148,384 bottles from 1954 to 1971, Pacific).[35] Oceanographic drift card recovery rates have ranged from 50 percent if released in densely populated areas (North Sea, Puget Sound) to 1 percent in uninhabited areas (Antarctica).[30] Recovery rates decrease as bottles are released further from shore, with oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer developing a rule of thumb that bottles released more than 100 miles from shore have recovery rates below 10 percent, and "only a few percent" of those released more than 1,000 miles from shore are recovered.[25] About 90 percent of marine debris washes up on less than 10 percent of the world's coastlines, favoring beaches perpendicular to the dominant ocean current.[2] Objects with similar buoyancy characteristics tend to collect together.[2]
A Scripps scientist said that marine organisms grow on the bottles, causing them to sink within eight to ten months unless washed ashore earlier.[36] An unknown number are found but not reported.[36]
Time and distance
Some drift bottles were not found for more than a century after being launched.[6][16][37][38][39]
Drift bottles and seabed drifters provide only a birth notice and an obituary – with no biography.
1973, Dean F. Bumpus, Senior Scientist Woods Hole Oceanographic Inst.[40]
Floating objects may ride gyres (large circulating current systems) that are present in each ocean, and may be transferred from one ocean's gyre to another's.[24] Further, objects may be sidetracked by wind, storms, countercurrents, and ocean current variation.[24] Accordingly, drift bottles have traveled large distances,[17] with drifts of 4,000 to 6,000 miles and more—sometimes traveling 100 miles per day—not uncommon.[19] Bottles have traveled from the Beaufort Sea above northern Alaska and northwestern Canada to northern Europe; from Antarctica to Tasmania; from Mexico to the Philippines; from Canada's Labrador Sea and Baffin Bay to Irish, French, Scottish, and Norwegian beaches;[6] from the Galapagos Islands to Australia;[41] and from New Zealand to Spain (practically antipodes).[42] Based on empirical data collected since 1901, a computer program called OSCURS (Ocean Surface Current Simulator) digitally simulates motion and timing of floating objects in and between ocean gyres.[43]
Despite being launched substantial time periods before being found, some bottles have been found physically close to their original launch points, such as a message launched by two girls in 1915 and found in 2012 near Harsens Island, Michigan, U.S.,[44] and a ten-year-old girl's message launched into the Indian River Bay in Delaware, U.S. in 1971 and found in adjacent Delaware Seashore State Park in 2016.[34]
Historical examples
Historical examples are listed in chronological order, based on year of recovery (when applicable):
This late-1700s ocean circulation map was based on the work of Benjamin Franklin and James Poupard after conducting drift bottle experiments, apparently still unaware of the Gulf Stream's origin in the Gulf of Mexico. This romanticized Édouard Riou drawing of a message in a bottle was included in Jules Verne's 1860s book In Search of the Castaways.A man launches a "St Kilda mailboat" from the isolated island about 110 miles (180km) northwest of the Scottish mainland, ca. 1898. Usually formed of sheepskin bladders providing flotation for boat-shaped enclosures for letters, the "mailboats" reached Scotland with some degree of reliability, and also to Scandinavia.
When Christopher Columbus encountered a severe storm while returning from America, he is said to have written on parchment what he had found in the New World and requested it be forwarded to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, enclosed the parchment in a waxed cloth and placed it into a large wooden barrel to be cast into the sea.[47] The communication was never found.[47]
On April 15, 1841, the Wellington, W.C. Kendrick, Commander, bound "from Madras and Cape bound to London", launched a bottled message in the mid-Atlantic (at 13°N) "for the purpose of throwing some light on the ocean currents".[48]
In 1847, from the brig Eagle laden with corn for the starving Irish in Waterford, Ireland, master Gregg dropped a bottled message with his location (42.40N, 54.10W) on March 27, requesting the find be sent to the Nautical Magazine (London) for publication to provide information on Atlantic currents. The bottle was retrieved on July 20 by Capt. Robert Oke on the revenue cutter Caledonia[49] off the coast of Newfoundland (46.36N, 55.30W).[50]
In February 1862, the Bashford Hall "sent afloat a message in a bottle describing her perilous state." However, she arrived safely at Falmouth, England on March 6, 1862.[51]
After the January 11, 1866 sinking of the SS London in the Bay of Biscay, bottled messages—reported as "farewell messages from passengers... to friends and relatives in England"—were reportedly found in months following.[52]
In 1875, ship's steward Van Hoydek and cabin boy Henry Trusillo of the British sailing ship Lennie released 24 bottled messages into the Bay of Biscay, telling of the murder by mutineers of their captain and officers.[53] French authorities soon received the message, rescued Hoydek and Trusillo, and brought the mutineers to justice.[53][54]
In 1876, on the remote Scottish island of St Kilda, freelance journalist John Sands and marooned Austrian sailors deployed two messages requesting the Austrian Consul rescue them with provisions.[55] The messages, each enclosed in a cocoa tin attached to a sheep's bladder for flotation in an arrangement later called a "St. Kilda mail boat",[56] were discovered in Orkney within nine days and in Ross-Shire after 22 days.[55] Since that time, sending "St. Kilda mail" has become a recreational ritual for island visitors, the containers often riding the Gulf Stream to the British mainland, Shetland, Orkney and Scandinavia.[55]
20th century
Message-bearing bottles from Titanic (1912)[57] and Lusitania (1915)[6] have been widely recounted as fact, but even before these bottles were found The Irish News stated in April 1912 that "very many" such stories turn out to be "cruel hoaxes".[57]
In February 1916, when German Zeppelin L 19 experienced unfavorable weather, battle damage and multiple engine failure after attacking the British Midlands, its commander's last message to superiors and the crew's final letters to relatives were released into the North Sea to be found on a Swedish coast six months later.[58][59] The written descriptions of how a British fishing trawler had refused to rescue the downed Zeppelin's crew—the trawler captain claiming he feared the German airmen would overpower his own unarmed crew—contributed to an enduring international controversy.[60]
On December 23, 1927, Frances Wilson Grayson, niece of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, was to attempt to be the first woman to make a transatlantic flight (non-solo). However, her Sikorsky amphibian plane disappeared en route from New York's Long Island to Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, and was never found. A bottled message was found in Salem Harbor, Massachusetts, in January 1929, the unauthenticated message reading, "1928, we are freezing. Gas leaked out. We are drifting off Grand Banks. Grayson."[61]
In December 1928, a trapper working at the mouth of the Agawa River, Ontario, found a bottled note from Alice Bettridge, an assistant stewardess in her early twenties who initially survived the December 1927 sinking in a blizzard of the freighter Kamloops and, before she herself perished, wrote "I am the last one left alive, freezing and starving to death on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. I just want mom and dad to know my fate."[62]
In 1929, a bottle that came to be known as the Flying Dutchman was released by a German marine science expedition with instructions for any finders to report the find but return the bottle to the sea.[14] Found at several locations in succession, the Flying Dutchman traveled 16,000 miles from its release point in the southern Indian Ocean, to Cape Horn in South America, and back through the Indian Ocean to its last reported find in 1935 on the west coast of Australia.[14]
On the night of March 28, 1941 in the last moments of the Battle of Cape Matapan, aboard the sinking cruiser Fiume Italian sailor Francesco Chirico wrote a farewell message and threw it overboard in a bottle. Chirico's message, including a note, "Please give news to my dear mother that I die for the homeland...", was found in 1952 near Villasimius, Sardinia.[63]
On January 7, 1943, a Schweppes lemonade bottle was found near Woolnorth in northwestern Tasmania, containing a penciled message thrown overboard on April 17, 1916, by Australian soldier John Oppy as his troop ship passed between Encounter Bay and Kangaroo Island, South Australia.[64] Oppy himself survived to see the message returned.[64]
The notion of the message in a bottle has come to attain a kind of romanticism, built perhaps on the allure of the exotic mystery its contents might reveal from a faraway place or a long-ago time.
On Christmas Day 1945, 21-year-old medical corpsman Frank Hayostek threw a message-laden aspirin bottle from his Liberty ship as it approached New York, the bottle being found eight months later near Dingle, County Kerry, by Irish milkmaid Breda O'Sullivan.[66] Her mailed reply began a correspondence that inspired Hayostek to save money for airfare to visit O'Sullivan in 1952.[66] Intense media attention for the "impossibly romantic story",[67] including Time magazine stories, overshadowed their two-week visit, the two parting but corresponding until they married other people in 1958 and 1959.[66] Media attention endured through the sixtieth anniversary of their meeting,[67] 2–3 years after their deaths.[68][66]
In 1956, Swedish sailor Ake Viking sent a bottled message "To Someone Beautiful and Far Away" that reached a 17-year-old Sicilian girl named Paolina, sparking a correspondence that culminated in their marriage in 1958.[70] The affair attracted so much attention that 4,000 people celebrated their wedding.[71]
In 1959 Guinness Brewery launched 150,000 bottles into the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea in a promotional campaign.[24] It was reported that Inuit hunters on Coats Island, in Canada's Hudson Bay, found 80 of the bottles.[24]
In 1969, a Canadian scientific expedition dropped a message bottle through a hole in the drift ice at the approximate North Pole. The bottle was found in 1972 in northeast Iceland.[72]
In May 1976, National Geographic World magazine released 1,000 bottles—250 per week—from the cruise ship Song of Norway, with instructions in five languages to fill out and return cards, in order to help map ocean currents.[73]
A message that an American couple released from a cruise ship approaching Hawaii in 1979 was found off Songkhla Beach, Thailand by a former South Vietnamese soldier and his family as they fled that country's communist regime by boat.[76] A correspondence relationship began in 1983, and the couple worked with U.S. Immigration to help the Vietnamese family obtain refugee status in 1985 and move to the U.S.[76]
In 1991 a bottled message found on Vancouver Island, Canada, urged the release of Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng.[24][25] Believed to have been released in 1980 near Quemoy Island, China, it is thought to be among Taiwan propaganda bottles launched toward mainland China.[24][25]
In what was described as "perhaps the most famous message in a bottle love story",[77] in March 1999 a green ginger beer bottle was dredged up by a fisherman off the Essex coast, the bottle containing an 84 year old letter tossed into the English channel on September 9, 1914, by British soldier Private Thomas Hughes days before he was killed in fighting in France.[33] Hughes' letter, written for delivery to his wife who had died in 1979, was delivered instead to his then 86-year-old daughter in New Zealand by the fisherman himself, who with his own wife was flown to New Zealand at the expense of New Zealand Post.[33]
This postcard, inserted into a bottle launched by the Marine Biological Association of the U.K. circa 1906, was found in 2015.
21st century
A teardrop-shaped bottle was found in March 2002 on a beach in Kent, England, containing an unsigned letter from a French woman expressing her enduring grief over the death of her son at age 13.[78][79] British author Karen Liebreich spent years of research, unsuccessfully trying to find the mother and eventually publishing a book called The Letter in the Bottle (2006).[79] The book was published in French in 2009, sparking huge media coverage[78] that alerted the mother for the first time that her letter had actually been discovered.[79] Saying she initially felt violated by publication of her personal suffering, on condition of continued anonymity, she agreed to tell Liebreich the details of her son's 1981 death in a bicycle accident, her decades of suffering afterwards, and the story surrounding release of her letter from an English Channel ferry.[78][79]
In May 2005, three days after eighty-eight migrants were abandoned by human smugglers on a disabled boat, the migrants tied an SOS-bearing bottle to a long line of a passing fishing vessel, whose captain alerted authorities to rescue the migrants.[80]
On December 10, 2006, a bottom drift bottle, released on April 25, 1914, northeast of the Shetland Islands by the Marine Laboratory, Aberdeen, U.K., was recovered by a Shetland fisherman, after the bottle had spent over 92 years at sea.[81]
In October 2011 in waters off Somalia, the crew of the pirated cargo ship Montecristo used a bottle with a flashing beacon to alert NATO ships that they had retreated to an armored room, permitting a military rescue operation to proceed with knowledge that the crew was not being held hostage.[82]
In April 2012 a fisherman recovered a bottom drift bottle that had been released 98 years earlier, on June 10, 1914,[6][31] one of 1,890 released by the Glasgow School of Navigation to test undercurrents in the seas around Scotland.[83] The 2012 find occurred east of Shetland by the Copious, the same fishing vessel involved in the 2006 find.[84]
In a 2013 promotional campaign, Norwegian soft drink company Solo released a 26-foot, 2.7-ton replica soda bottle outfitted with a customized camera, navigation lights, an automatic identification system, a radar reflector, and GPS tracking technology, all powered by solar panels.[85] The craft drifted from Tenerife, Canary Islands, while broadcasting its location, but its electronics were stolen by pirates before its five-month trip terminated at Los Roques archipelago near Venezuela.[86]
In April 2013, a kite-surfer near the mouth of Croatia's Neretva River recovered a bottle containing a message purporting to have been sent in 1985 from Nova Scotia to fulfill a promise by a "Jonathon" to write to one "Mary".[87] The message received international media attention.[88]
In March 2014, a fisherman on the Baltic Sea near Kiel recovered a drift bottle containing a Danish postcard dated May 17, 1913, and signed by a then-20-year-old baker's son named Richard Platz, who asked for it to be delivered to his Berlin address.[37] Researchers located Platz's granddaughter, by then 62, and delivered the 101-year-old message to her, Platz himself having died in 1946.[37]
This bottled message, released June 12, 1886, from a German sailing vessel in the Indian Ocean as part of a drift bottle study, was found on a beach in Western Australia in 2018.
In 2016, Cuban migrants who had fled Cuba in a homemade boat, launched a bottled SOS message complaining of their treatment while being detained for 42 days aboard a United States Coast Guard Cutter.[90]
In late 2016, a barnacle-encrusted, kelp-tangled GoPro video camera was recovered, the camera's memory card preserving footage showing the prelude to the camera's being swept overboard four years earlier, and also recording its first two hours underwater off Fingal Bay, Australia.[91]
In 2017, a small unmanned boat made by high school students and having solar panels, sensors and camera, drifted on an unexpected path from near Maine, to approach Spain and Portugal, then drift westward back into the Atlantic and northward to be discovered in Benbecula in the western isles of Scotland.[92] The boat had a waterproof pod containing a chip that collected sensor data.[92]
In July 2017, a Scottish widower seeking female companionship set 2,000 bottled messages adrift at various locations around the U.K., and though claiming he received responses from 50 women, ceased the practice in response to public complaints and an investigation by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency.[93]
In January 2018, a couple walking on a beach in Western Australia discovered a bottled message that had been launched on June 12, 1886, from the German barquePaula conducting drift bottle experiments for the German Naval Observatory.[38][39] The message's authenticity was corroborated through the ship captain's original Meteorological Journal, and, at 131 years' duration, eclipsed the previous corroborated record duration of 108 years.[38][39] The bottle's thick glass and its opening's narrow bore are thought to have protected the paper from the elements.[38]
In the summer of 2018, a bottled typewritten message dated March 26, 1930, was discovered in the roof of the twelfth-century Goslar Cathedral in Goslar, Germany, signed by four roofers who bemoaned the economic state of that country.[94] The bottle was discovered by a roofer who was the grandson of one of the signatories, who had been an 18-year-old roofing apprentice in 1930.[94] Goslar's mayor replaced the bottle with a copy of the 1930 message, adding his own confidential message.[94]
In May 2019, a Gatorade bottle with a four-page letter, written in Spanish, was found in Brown Bay, near Mount Gambier, South Australia. The letter had been sent from Caleta Córdoba, near Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina by a mother and two children as a loving tribute to their husband and father who had died of a stroke a year earlier.[95]
In June 2019, three hikers trapped above a waterfall on California's Arroyo Seco tributary released a Nalgene bottled SOS message that was quickly discovered a quarter mile (0.4km) downstream, allowing them to be rescued by helicopter the following morning.[96][97]
In late 2019, a bottled message launched on August 1, 1994, by 12-year-old Ryan Mead was found near the mouth of the Taramakau River, New Zealand, the find occurring mere months after Mead died at age 37 in a freak accident inhaling fumes while laying carpet.[98]
Long-duration events
Table listing long-duration (>25-year) events involving messages in bottles:
Click at right to show/hide Table
(Still-living individuals are not identified by name unless they are independently notable.)
Besides interest in citizen science drift-bottle experiments,[31] message-in-a-bottle lore has often been of a romantic or poetic nature.[77] Such messages have been romanticized in literature, from Edgar Allan Poe's 1833 story "MS. Found in a Bottle" through Nicholas Sparks' 1998 Message in a Bottle.[142] Clint Buffington, subject of the 2019 documentary short filmThe Tides That Bind / A Message in a Bottle Story,[143] surmised in an interview with The Guardian that sending a bottled message expresses a hope to find connection in a fear-filled world.[144] In Newsweek Ryan Bort recounted various historical messages as being cries for help, or "final, poetic words of resignation left behind for (an) indifferent sea", or from "lonely, lovelorn souls, searching for serendipity", or a search for "affirmation ... that comes from somewhere other than yourself".[77] Bort described sending a message in a bottle as a romantic act that has "such a delicious potential for magic" or as "surrendering a part of yourself to something larger", concluding that "every message in a bottle is a prayer".[77]
Finding a bottled message has generally been viewed positively, the finder of a 98-year-old message referring to his find as winning the lottery.[84] However, intense media attention over a personal relationship that resulted from one woman's find, is said to have caused her to remark that had she known what would happen, she would have left the bottle on the beach.[66] Another woman said she initially felt shocked and violated by publication of the personal suffering she had expressed in a bottled letter that she never expected would be found or read.[78][79]
Balloon mail involves sending undirected messages through the air rather than into bodies of water.[147] For example, during the Prussian siege of Paris in 1870, about 2.5 million letters were sent by hot air balloon, the only way Parisians' letters could reach the rest of France.[148]
Stationary time capsules have been termed "messages in a bottle", such as a 1935 message in a lemonade bottle correctly portending difficult times, which was found in 2016 by masons restoring damaged Portland stone at Southampton Guildhall.[112] A geologist left a bottled message in 1959 in a cairn on isolated Ward Hunt Island (Canada, 83°N latitude), allowing its finders in 2013 to determine that a nearby glacier had retreated over 200 feet in the intervening 54 years.[120] More durable examples of time capsules are the Westinghouse Time Capsules of the 1939 and 1964 New York World's Fairs, intended to be opened 5,000 years after their creation.[149]
Certain emergency medical services urge patients to record information describing their medical conditions, medications and drug allergies, emergency contacts,[151] as well as advance healthcare directives for when the patients are incapacitated[152] or suffer from dementia or learning difficulties,[153] and place the record as a special "message in a bottle" stored in (conventionally) a refrigerator, where paramedics can quickly locate it.[151][152][153]
Environmental issues
Plastic bottles are known to constitute plastic marine pollution, and eventually break down into smaller pieces because of ultraviolet light, salt degradation or wave action.[154] Glass bottles can break into sharp-edged pieces, and bottle caps are ingested by sea birds.[154]
Some agencies continue to use drift bottles into the 21st century, but with increased awareness that man-made floating items can harm marine life or constitute waste material,[24][4] biodegradable drift cards[3] and biodegradable wooden drifters[4] with non-toxic ink[154] are gaining favor.
The Austro-Hungarian North Pole expedition was an Arctic expedition to find the North-East Passage that ran from 1872 to 1874 under the leadership of Julius Payer and Karl Weyprecht. The expedition discovered and partially explored Franz Josef Land.
The Portuguese man o' war, also known as the man-of-war or bluebottle, is a marine hydrozoan found in the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean. It is considered to be the same species as the Pacific man o' war or bluebottle, which is found mainly in the Pacific Ocean. The Portuguese man o' war is the only species in the genus Physalia, which in turn is the only genus in the family Physaliidae.
In underwater diving, open water is unrestricted water such as a sea, lake, river, or flooded quarry. It is a contradistinction to confined water where initial skills training takes place. Open water also means the diver has direct vertical access to the surface of the water in contact with the Earth's atmosphere. Open water diving implies that if a problem arises, the diver can directly ascend vertically to the atmosphere to breathe air. Penetration diving—involving entering caves or wrecks, or diving under ice—is therefore not "open water diving". In some contexts the lack of a decompression obligation is considered a necessary condition for classification of a dive as an open water dive, as a decompression obligation is a procedural and safety restriction on immediate ascent to the surface, but this does not affect the classification of the venue as open water.
A ghost ship, also known as a phantom ship, is a vessel with no living crew aboard; it may be a fictional ghostly vessel, such as the Flying Dutchman, or a physical derelict found adrift with its crew missing or dead, like the Mary Celeste. The term is sometimes used for ships that have been decommissioned but not yet scrapped, as well as drifting boats that have been found after breaking loose of their ropes and being carried away by the wind or the waves.
The Vancouver Aquarium is a public aquarium located in Stanley Park in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. In addition to being a major tourist attraction for Vancouver, the aquarium is a centre for marine research, ocean literacy education, climate activism, conservation and marine animal rehabilitation.
Marine debris, also known as marine litter, is human-created solid material that has deliberately or accidentally been released in a sea or ocean. Floating oceanic debris tends to accumulate at the center of gyres and on coastlines, frequently washing aground, when it is known as beach litter or tidewrack. Deliberate disposal of wastes at sea is called ocean dumping. Naturally occurring debris, such as driftwood and drift seeds, are also present. With the increasing use of plastic, human influence has become an issue as many types of (petrochemical) plastics do not biodegrade quickly, as would natural or organic materials. The largest single type of plastic pollution (~10%) and majority of large plastic in the oceans is discarded and lost nets from the fishing industry. Waterborne plastic poses a serious threat to fish, seabirds, marine reptiles, and marine mammals, as well as to boats and coasts.
The Great Pacific garbage patch 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. The collection of plastic and floating trash originates from the Pacific Rim, including countries in Asia, North America, and South America.
Beachcombing is an activity that consists of an individual "combing" the beach and the intertidal zone, looking for things of value, interest or utility. A beachcomber is a person who participates in the activity of beachcombing.
Sea glass are naturally weathered pieces of glass, which often have the appearance of tumbled stones. Sea glass is physically and chemically weathered glass found on beaches along bodies of salt water. These weathering processes produce natural frosted glass. Sea glass is used for decoration, most commonly in jewellery. "Beach glass" comes from fresh water and is often less frosted in appearance than sea glass. Sea glass takes 20–40 years, and sometimes as much as 100–200 years, to acquire its characteristic texture and shape. It is also colloquially referred to as drift glass from the longshore drift process that forms the smooth edges. In practice, the two terms are used interchangeably.
Curtis Charles Ebbesmeyer is an American oceanographer based in Seattle, Washington. In retirement, he has studied the movement of flotsam to track ocean currents.
Friendly Floatees are plastic bath toys 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. Ebbesmeyer studied the movements of a consignment of 28,800 Friendly Floatees—yellow ducks, red beavers, blue turtles, and green frogs—that were washed into the Pacific Ocean in 1992. Some of the toys landed along Pacific Ocean shores, such as Hawaii. Others traveled over 27,000 kilometres (17,000 mi), floating over the site where the Titanic sank, and spent years frozen in Arctic ice before reaching the U.S. Eastern Seaboard as well as Irish and also British shores, fifteen years later, in 2007.
Hansa Carrier was a container ship. On 27 May 1990, en route from Korea to the United States, the ship encountered a storm which caused the loss of 21 40-foot cargo containers south of the Alaska Peninsula, near 48°N161°W. Five of these cargo containers contained 61,000 Nike shoes, each of which carried a unique serial number which later made it possible to clearly identify them as part of the spilled cargo. The "Great Shoe Spill of 1990" was one of the several occasions when shipping accidents have contributed to the knowledge of ocean currents and aided scientists and amateur researchers in their endeavours.
Plastic pellet pollution is a type of marine debris originating from the plastic particles that are universally used to manufacture large-scale plastics. In the context of plastic pollution, these pre-production plastic pellets are commonly known as 'nurdles'. These microplastics are created separately from the user plastics they are melted down to form, and pellet loss can occur during both the manufacturing and transport stages. When released into the open environment, they create persistent pollution both in the oceans and on beaches. About 230,000 tonnes of nurdles are thought to be deposited in the oceans each year, where they are often mistaken for food by seabirds, fish and other wildlife. Due to their small size, they are notoriously difficult to clear up from beaches and elsewhere.
The North Atlantic garbage patch is a garbage patch of man-made marine debris found floating within the North Atlantic Gyre, originally documented in 1972. A 22-year research study conducted by the Sea Education Association estimates the patch to be hundreds of kilometers across, with a density of more than 200,000 pieces of debris per square kilometer. The garbage originates from human-created waste traveling from rivers into the ocean and mainly consists of microplastics. The garbage patch is a large risk to wildlife through plastic consumption and entanglement. There have only been a few awareness and clean-up efforts for the North Atlantic garbage patch, such as The Garbage Patch State at UNESCO and The Ocean Cleanup, as most of the research and cleanup efforts have been focused on the Great Pacific garbage patch, a similar garbage patch in the north Pacific.
Plastic pollution is the accumulation of plastic objects and particles in the Earth's environment that adversely affects humans, wildlife and their habitat. Plastics that act as pollutants are categorized by size into micro-, meso-, or macro debris. Plastics are inexpensive and durable, making them very adaptable for different uses; as a result, manufacturers choose to use plastic over other materials. However, the chemical structure of most plastics renders them resistant to many natural processes of degradation and as a result they are slow to degrade. Together, these two factors allow large volumes of plastic to enter the environment as mismanaged waste which persists in the ecosystem and travels throughout food webs.
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (MH370/MAS370) was an international passenger flight operated by Malaysia Airlines that disappeared from radar on 8 March 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia to its planned destination, Beijing Capital International Airport in China. It has not been determined what caused its disappearance.
The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a scheduled international passenger flight from Kuala Lumpur International Airport to Beijing Capital International Airport on 8 March 2014, prompted a large, multinational search in Asia and the southern Indian Ocean that became the most expensive search in aviation history. Analysis of communications between the aircraft and Inmarsat by multiple agencies has concluded that the flight ended in the southern Indian Ocean.
The timeline of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 lists events associated with the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370—a scheduled, commercial flight operated by Malaysia Airlines from Kuala Lumpur International Airport to Beijing Capital International Airport on 8 March 2014 with 227 passengers and 12 crew. Air traffic control lost contact with Flight 370 less than an hour into the flight, after which it was tracked by military radar crossing the Malay Peninsula and was last located over the Andaman Sea. Analysis of automated communications between the aircraft and a satellite communications network has determined that the aircraft flew into the southern Indian Ocean, before communication ended shortly after 08:19 (UTC+8:00). The disappearance initiated a multi-national search effort that became the most expensive search in aviation history.
A drift whale is a cetacean mammal that has died at sea and floated into shore. This is in contrast to a beached or stranded whale, which reaches land alive and may die there or regain safety in the ocean. Most cetaceans that die, from natural causes or predators, do not wind up on land; most die far offshore and sink deep to become novel ecological zones known as whale falls. Some species that wash ashore are scientifically dolphins, i.e. members of the family Delphinidae, but for ease of use, this article treats them all as "drift whales". For example, one species notorious for mass strandings is the pilot whale, also known as "blackfish", which is taxonomically a dolphin.
1 2 3 Lederer, Muriel (Fall 1971). "Letters from the Sea"(PDF). University of Florida Digital Collections: The Panama Canal Review. Archived(PDF) from the original on September 4, 2016.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Krajick, Kevin (2001). "Message in a Bottle"(PDF). University of Washington. Archived(PDF) from the original on September 18, 2016. From Smithsonian, July 2001, pp. 36-42.
↑ Ingraham Jr., W. James. "Getting to Know OSCURS, REFM's Ocean Surface Current Simulator". Alaska Fisheries Science Center (NOAA). Archived from the original on November 28, 2016. Originally published in the Alaska Fisheries Science Center Quarterly Report, April–May–June, 1997. Program limited North Pacific from 10° N latitude to the Bering Strait.
↑ Verne, Jules (1874). "Chapter 1. The Shark". In Search of the Castaways (Project Gutenberg eBook released August 16, 2014ed.). J.B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia (original publisher). Archived from the original on March 27, 2016.
↑ The Times-Picayune. October 26, 1841. Page 2. No author listed. Republished information that appears to have originated in Guayama, Puerto Rico. Quote: "Ship Wellington of London, W.C. Kendrick, Commander, From Madras and Cape bound to London. Lat. 13 degrees 58' North, Long. 35 degrees 30' West. This bottle is dispatched for the purpose of throwing some light on the ocean currents, and it is earnestly requested that the time and place of finding it may be publicly made known. At Sea, April 15th, 1841."
↑ "Memoranda". Morning Courier. St. John's, Newfoundland. 14 Aug 1847. p.3. Retrieved 7 March 2017. |via=Memorial University of Newfoundland Digital Archives Initiative
↑ Belfast News-Letter. May 12, 1862. Page 5. Belfast, North Ireland.
↑ The Hamilton Spectator. Page 3. May 12, 1866. No author listed. Quotes: "The Argus contains an account of certain bottles found on the French coast of the terrible Bay of Biscay." A retelling of this account reveals that the bottles contained "farewell messages from passengers by the London to friends and relatives in England." According to one D.W. Lemmon, presumed drowned: "The ship is sinking," he wrote, "no hope of being saved." Mr. H.F.D. Denis wrote "Adieu, father, brothers and sisters, and my dear Edith. Steamer London, Bay of Biscay. Ship too heavily laden for its size, and too crank. Windows stove in. Water coming in everywhere. God bless my poor orphans. Storm not too violent for a ship in good condition."
1 2 "Oldest message in a bottle". Guinness World Records. February 2, 2012. Archived from the original on February 2, 2012. Guinness web page was subsequently superseded; refer instead to archive link.
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