Bottles dropped to uncork secrets of ocean currents

By Margaret Munro, Postmedia News

Jenelle Reece and her schoolmates had just finished tossing hundreds of beer bottles overboard when a humpback and her calf swam up for a friendly encounter.

The whales hung around for close to an hour, splashing their mottled flippers and sidling up so close the students could almost touch their huge heads. Then the humpbacks, like the beer bottles, headed for parts unknown.

``Just unbelievable,'' says Ernie Hill, principal of the school in Hartley Bay, a remote First Nations village on British Columbia's Central Coast, who welcomed a chance for his students to participate in a growing global experiment.

The drift bottle project, led by federal scientist Eddy Carmack at Fisheries and Ocean Canada, is charting surface currents and how they can carry things along - be it beer bottles, young salmon or spilled oil.

Carmack's growing army of volunteers from Greenland to B.C. has dropped more than 4,500 bottles since 2000. Each one carries a message saying when and where it was tossed and asking the finder to contact Carmack's team.

Some bottles beach within days, many sink and the ones that meet their demise on rocks ``return to the earth,'' says Carmack, as the glass, paper and cork break down.

But others make incredible journeys.

One far-flung ``drifter'' turned up in Puerto Rico after travelling about 15, 000 kilometres - almost a third of the way around the Earth - from where it was dropped near Baffin Island four years earlier. Another 50 bottles tossed off icebreakers and ships in Canada's North slipped out of the Arctic by Greenland, and were swept across the Atlantic, bobbing along at five to 10 kilometres a day, before making landfall in Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Norway and Denmark.

Carmack says the bottles do ``a pretty good job of mimicking anything that is floating in the surface waters.''

This fall's 500-bottle drop in B.C. waters helps underscore how poorly understood the currents are off the rugged Central Coast - and the danger posed by plans to ship Alberta's crude oil to Asia and the United States, says Hill, who is also a hereditary chief in Hartley Bay.

The community, accessible by boat and air, is part of the growing coalition opposed to Enbridge Inc.'s proposed Northern Gateway project to pipe crude from Alberta's oilsands to a container terminal in Kitimat, B.C., where more than 200 supertankers a year would be filled and head down a long channel passing within sight of Hartley Bay.

``It would be the end to our way of life,'' says Hill, noting the waters are home to killer, humpback and fin whales, five species of salmon and a bounty that has sustained aboriginal people for eons.

Carmack says there is plenty to learn about currents and the ``globally unique'' waters on the Central Coast. But he stresses the B.C. bottle drop is not a protest against Enbridge's supertankers.

``The bottles don't say `Stop the oil tankers,' '' says Carmack, a senior scientist at the federal Institute of Ocean Sciences outside Victoria. ``Our group is not taking a stand.''

``This is an experiment, and it's one the public can participate in, that can add to the body of knowledge that we need to make better decisions,'' says Carmack, who has long championed ``fish boat'' or ``folk'' science projects that make ocean research relevant to communities and young people.

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