Christy Peterson - Into the deep: Science, Technology, and the Quest to Protect the Ocean

O n January 21, 2018, a woman walking along a sandy beach in Western Australia noticed a dark brown bottle partially buried in the sand. Thinking it might make a unique decoration for her home, she retrieved it and showed it to her family. The discovery proved to be more intriguing than expected. Inside the bottle, covered in damp sand, lay a tightly wrapped roll of paper secured with twine.

The family feared that unwrapping the damp paper might damage the document, so they dried it in the oven. Then they carefully unrolled it to reveal the contents: a combination of typeset and handwritten text. Written in German, the preprinted portion included instructions to ship the bottle back to the German Naval Observatory in Hamburg. The handwritten section recorded the ships name, the Paula ; the ships home port, Elsfleth; its port of departure, Cardiff; and its destination, Makassar. It also noted the location where the bottle went overboard. But the most surprising portion of the message was the dateJune 12, 1886.

Was the bottle a fantastic piece of history or just an elaborate hoax? The family turned to the Western Australian Museum for assistance. The museum discovered that the bottlea gin bottle made in the Netherlandsdid indeed date from the late nineteenth century. And experts in Germany confirmed that a ship named Paula set sail from Cardiff bound for Makassar in 1886. They located the ships meteorological journal, which contained an entry for June 12, 1886, noting the deployment of a drift bottle. The handwriting in the journal exactly matched the paper found in the bottle.

The experts determined that the bottle had been part of an experiment conceived by German scientist Georg von Neumayer, who wanted to know more about ocean currents. He hoped this research would help shipping companies move goods around the world more efficiently. Beginning in 1864, commercial ships deployed more than 6,000 bottles. Of those, 662 eventually found their way back to Germany. The 663rd bottle, found in 2018, is on loan to the Western Australia Museum.

Scientist and explorer Georg von Neumayer (18261909), who was born in Germany and spent much of his life in Australia, was proponent of international collaboration and cooperation in scientific endeavors.

Von Neumayer was not the first to throw bottles overboard to study ocean currents. The earliest known drift bottle study occurred in 310 BCE when Greek philosopher Theophrastus tossed sealed bottles overboard to prove that water flowing in from the Atlantic Ocean had formed the Mediterranean Sea. However, the German study coincided with the earliest days of a new area of science: oceanography. The bottle unearthed on an Australian beach 132 years after it was tossed overboard was part of an early attempt to understand the ocean in a new way.