Message in a Bottle: GPS Tracking Style
6 Mar 2017We’ve all dreamed of finding a message in a bottle at some point or another in our lives, and for one Scottish woman, this daydream has become reality. When Rhoda Meek, who lives on the island of Tiree in the Inner Hebrides, was told by a friend that something very intriguing has washed ashore, she eagerly set off to investigate. What she found was a GPS-tracked experimental device that has come all the way from Iceland.
What had happened was that a pair of GPS-tracked capsules were dropped via a helicopter into the sea as an element of a project between engineering company Verkis and Iceland’s national broadcasting company.
The project was begun to illustrate to children than when trash is dumped into the sea, it doesn’t just disappear. It eventually reaches the shore and is a huge environmental issue that affects both wildlife and people living on the world’s coastlines.
At the time of writing, the second of the devices is floating somewhere in the sea off the Western Isles.
The team of Icelandic scientists had initially expected both devices to land in Norway after floating beyond Greenland and reaching close to the coast of Canada. However, they continued to travel south, finding their way to Scotland.
Eastern winds caused the bottles to circle Iceland for some time, eventually travelling towards the Labrador and Newfoundland coast. By August, winds blowing from the north nudged the devices southeast along the Labrador coast, by September they’d headed east towards the center of the Atlantic. Once there, they travelled, east and northeast and after 14,500 km of floating, reached Scotland.
If you’re wondering what Rhoda did with the bottle when she discovered it, she packed it up carefully and sent it back to Iceland. Interestingly, throughout the time they were in the oceans, the bottles stayed remarkably close together and if you want to take a look for yourself and see their extraordinary journey, you can find it here.
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