Bon Voyage, No. 51!
Tracking the GEOMAR bottle on the Internet
29 April 2014/Kiel, Skagerrak. Last night, the ferry "Color Fantasy", on her trip from Kiel to Oslo, launched a total of 51 drift bottles. Fifty of these bottles contain messages from children from all over Schleswig-Holstein which they had written in the context of the "Drift Bottle" project of the "Kieler Nachrichten" newspaper. Bottle No. 51, significantly larger, comes from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel. It contains a transmitter which relays the position of the bottle via satellite, which then can be followed on the Internet.
The motivation for this project was the discovery of a 101 year old bottle in the Bay of Kiel in March 2014. This find brought nationwide interest, and the bottle is now part of the collection at the International Maritime Museum in Hamburg. The "Kieler Nachrichten" newspaper then asked children from Schleswig-Holstein to submit messages and pictures for their own drift bottle. There were more than 1,800 entries, and 50 winners were drawn. They were allowed to launch their own messages in a bottle into the Baltic Sea during the voyage from Kiel to Oslo.
To ensure that the bottles do not just disappear into the dark blue, a transmitter-equipped bottle should accompany the children’s bottles. "Of course, we have experience with receiving position information from the open ocean," explains Andreas Pinck, an engineer from the Technology and Logistics Centre at GEOMAR, "that’s probably why the Kieler Nachrichten asked us whether we could help them." This is somewhat of a reminder of the early days of oceanography when scientists tried to use drift bottles to track ocean currents. "So we were happy to help. And it’s not only the kids that will follow with anticipation where the bottles are headed," adds Dr. Andreas Villwock, head of Communications and Media at GEOMAR.
