A message written in 1914 and curled into a corked bottle was scooped out of the North Atlantic last month (NatGeo). Not a love note, but a research instrument.
The Glasgow School of Navigation sent 1,890 such bottles adrift, hoping to map deep ocean currents. They were weighted to float just above the ocean floor. The message inspires me to contemplate just how far our research methods have come in the last 98 years.
Via BoingBoing.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 3
anon — October 14, 2012
prtsimmons — October 16, 2012
I am a physical oceanography graduate school dropout, and I can assure you that oceanographers still used this method. It might have a fancier name in the grant proposal, but oceanographers still bottles (or plastic containers) with notes on them asking people to report where they found them. Our research methods have come a long, long way but some of the old ones still work.
James Jordan — September 18, 2023
I think it is amazing that a message in a bottle from 1914 was found after almost a century, and that it was part of an experiment to map the ocean currents.
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