Hitting The Bottle

Anyone who has ever walked on a beach in their lifetime has probably imagined finding a bottle washed up on shore with a note inside of it. Apparently it used to happen all the time back when people were still exploring the oceans but now it has fallen into the category of being another one of those cultural images which has probably been written about and appeared in movies 10,000 more times than it has happened in real life. Still, if you are anything like me you keep your eyes peeled for these bottles whenever you are near water, just in case. Of course that is only half the fantasy because in our minds these messages in a bottle always contain something extremely cool, like a note from a stranded traveler or the map to some distant location. Actually I think most of us would be excited to find anything, even it was just one of those generic "mail me a letter telling me where you found this" postcards that school kids send out usually attached to balloons because most of the time finding a bottle on the beach means the next step is finding a trash barrel to throw it in, as that is what you do with garbage. The point is the mere possibility of what could be in a bottle on the sand fills the average person with a sense of adventure. With that context in mind, how annoyed would you be if you finally found a bottle and it had a note in it only when you opened it up you rather than something fun you found homework? I know I would be pretty peeved but that is the situation a researcher team recently found themselves in.

The researchers were exploring a glacier in Canada at the point closest to the North Pole. There they found a bottle wedged between two rocks with a note inside dated July 10, 1959. Even more intriguing was that the note was signed by Paul Walker and Albert Crary - famous geologists around that time who had made several trips to the area to study the glaciers. Imagine how it must have felt to not only find a message in a bottle (sure the bottle was in snow and not on a beach, but let's not get picky) but to also have it be signed by a famous person in your field. This must have been a thrilling moment, something these geologists never thought they would experience (I don't imagine geology to be action-packed). Now, if this were a movie all of this would add up to the note containing some kind of profound message or the final clues to one last great discovery but instead it simply contained a note asking whoever found the bottle to measure the distance from a nearby rock to the edge of the ice formation and then mail their results to an address in Ohio. Sadly, neither Walker nor Crary are with us anymore but the scientists still honored their request and measured as the note requested (if you were wondering the ice shelf had retreated nearly 200 feet). I am not quite sure where they mailed the data but I hope it wasn't the address in the letter. When the note was written that street address was the home of Walker's parents who have no doubted passed on by now. That means there are new residents living there who would no doubt be excited at the thought of receiving a mysterious letter from a research team in Canada. They would probably be excited at what the letter could possibly have to do with them, only to be let down that it only contained measurements about an ice shelf. Hopefully the research team thought this through and held on to the data because I think this cycle of disappointment has gone far enough.