Science in a bottle: 132-year-old experiment washed ashore in Australia
<https://bbox.blackbaudhosting.com/webforms/service/page.redir?target=https%3a%2f%2farstechnica.com%2fscience%2f2018%2f03%2faustralian-beachgoers-dig-up-the-worlds-oldest-message-in-a-bottle%2f&srcid=7671117&srctid=1&erid=591117204&trid=13d82710-e4d0-4a2a-85c6-01806a81f6a8>
(Ars Technica)
A 132-year-old message in a bottle turned up on an Australian beach earlier
this year, but it’s not a love note or a treasure map: it’s a science
experiment.
Tonya Illman was walking the beach with a friend while they waited for her
son’s car to be dug out from the soft sand. That’s when she saw it. Illman’s
husband Kym traced the note and the bottle to an oceanography experiment
started by the German Naval Observatory in 1864. In an effort to map out faster
shipping routes by plotting the world’s ocean currents, German ships tossed
thousands of bottles overboard from 1864 to 1933, each one containing a form
listing the date and coordinates of the message, along with the ship’s name,
its home port, and the route it had been sailing at the time.
The back of the form asked the finder to record the date and location of the
find and then return the form to the German Naval Observatory in Hamburg or to
the nearest German consulate. Of the thousands of forms thrown into the world’s
oceans during the 69-year program, only 662 had been recovered—at least 20 of
them around the Australian coast. The last had turned up on the shores of
Denmark on January 7, 1934, a few months after the project’s official end.
Paul Petrich Jr
ppetrich39@xxxxxx
“In the end it is not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your
years.”…Anonymous
