Message In Bottle From Ireland Arrives In Russia 40 Years After Being Sent Off To Sea

Oct 29, 2021 by apost team

After 40 years, a message in a bottle from Ireland showed up north of the Russian port city Murmansk at Kola Bay, according to an Oct. 25 report from The Irish Times. Kola Bay is nearly 2,500 miles away from where researchers from NUI Galway's oceanography department tossed the bottle off of Ireland’s Atlantic coast.

The bottle, which contained a yellow piece of paper with the university’s address, is a “drifter,” a device that allows researchers to study ocean currents.

According to The Irish Times, researchers have two theories as to how the bottle made it to Kola Bay 40 years later. One theory is that a fishing boat picked up and then dropped the bottle in the port, whereas another hypothesis is that ocean currents carried the bottle across the North Sea and the Norwegian Sea and into the Barents Sea between the Nordic countries and Russia.

The publication further reports that practice of launching drifters out into the ocean was a more common practice before the advent of satellite technology, which is a more accurate and reliable method of tracking ocean currents.

It’s unclear how damaged the yellow paper in the bottle is. The yellow insert should list a serial number, which would allow researchers to pinpoint when and where the bottle was launched out into the ocean. The person who found the bottle reportedly sent an email with several photos of the bottle and card.

Oceanographers in Ireland have offered more insight on the mysterious 40-year-old message in a bottle.

Martin White, a professor at NUI Galway, told The Irish Times that he thinks the bottle made its way to Russia on its own, though he speculates that it may have reached Kola Bay years earlier.

“It could have been laying at the bottom of the bay for a decade or two,” White told the publication.

“But the card inside is not completely destroyed. It is a drifting bottle, so it would be near the surface, and therefore likely to take a more circuitous route than the main ocean currents, which are more persistent and direct in their travel.

“On the surface, it would have been at the behest of the winds and prevailing weather conditions, so it could have been moved around. The chances are it has taken some time to get there.”

White added that a former professor at NUI Galway, Ed Monahan, likely launched the bottle, as he worked with drifters in the 1970s and ‘80s. 

This isn’t the first time that this has happened. In July 2021, 9-year-old Abbie Graham of Keaau, Hawaii, found a bottle that contained a message originally sent from Japanese high school students 37 years ago in 1984, as the Hawaii Tribune-Herald reports.

The form in the bottle asked the recipient to acknowledge that it had been found and to indicate their name, their address and the longitude and latitude of the place it was discovered. Abbie and her family filled this out to the best of their ability and sent the form back to the Japanese high school.

The high school sent out 750 bottles from 1984 to 1985, and 50 were returned. The majority were found around Japan, but others came back from the United States, the Philippines and China. 

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Have you ever found a message in a bottle? What would you do if you found a “drifter”? Let us know — and be sure to pass this story on.