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132-Year-Old Science Experiment Washes Ashore In Australia (npr.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): A message in a bottle was tossed off the side of a German ship on June 12, 1886, as it sailed through the Indian Ocean, the date and location penned carefully in script on the scroll inside. In January, more than 131 years after the bottle was set adrift, an Australian woman walking on the beach noticed the thick, discolored glass of an old bottle poking through the sand. The bottle -- and the message -- had been found. It is believed to be the oldest known message in a bottle ever recovered. The woman, Tonya Illman, discovered the tokens from another era while walking on a beach near Wedge Island, in Western Australia.
The Illmans took their discovery to the Western Australian Museum, which verified that the bottle and the note date back to the 19th century. The museum contacted experts in the Netherlands and Germany for more information, and confirmed that the bottle had been dropped from a German vessel called the Paula. A search of German archives uncovered the Paula's original Meteorological Journal, and in a captain's entry from June 12, 1886, researchers discovered a reference to the bottle, thrown overboard as the ship was sailing from Cardiff, Wales, to Makassar, Indonesia. The date and the coordinates matched. The bottle had been tossed into the Indian Ocean from the ship as part of a decades-long experiment by the German Naval Observatory to understand ocean currents. Thousands of bottles were thrown into the ocean around the world from German ships between the 1860s and the 1930s, each with a form bearing the date and location where it had been tossed into the sea, the name of the ship, its home port and the travel route, the Western Australian Museum said.
The Illmans took their discovery to the Western Australian Museum, which verified that the bottle and the note date back to the 19th century. The museum contacted experts in the Netherlands and Germany for more information, and confirmed that the bottle had been dropped from a German vessel called the Paula. A search of German archives uncovered the Paula's original Meteorological Journal, and in a captain's entry from June 12, 1886, researchers discovered a reference to the bottle, thrown overboard as the ship was sailing from Cardiff, Wales, to Makassar, Indonesia. The date and the coordinates matched. The bottle had been tossed into the Indian Ocean from the ship as part of a decades-long experiment by the German Naval Observatory to understand ocean currents. Thousands of bottles were thrown into the ocean around the world from German ships between the 1860s and the 1930s, each with a form bearing the date and location where it had been tossed into the sea, the name of the ship, its home port and the travel route, the Western Australian Museum said.
I wonder how the bottle was sealed. If it was a cork, I'm surprised that it didn't rot or leak after 130 years.
It wasn't sealed when they found it. The message survived because it was buried in sand.
From TFA: (npr and bbc)
The bottle probably arrived on the western shores of Australia within a year of being thrown overboard, the research report stated. There, it is "likely to have spent the majority of its life buried within a layer of damp sand to have remained so well preserved, with a period of recent exposure allowing its fortuitous discovery by the finders."
It seems likely the construction of the bottle had something to do with it.
Oldest message in a bottle found on Western Australia beach
Sand dunes in the area are quite mobile during storm events and heavy rain, so the bottle could have been subject to "cyclical periods of exposure" which could have led to the cork in the bottle drying out and becoming dislodged, "while the tightly rolled paper along with a quantity of sand remained inside preserved".
"The narrow 7mm bore of the bottle opening and thick glass would have assisted to buffer and preserve the paper from the effects of full exposure to the elements, providing a protective microenvironment favourable to the paper's long-term preservation," the report added.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
It did not just now wash ashore as the headline implies. 133 year old experiment that washed ashore years ago was just now found.