Message in a bottle from Japan found on Oregon beach

Dave Masko -

“I’ll send an S.O.S. to the world…I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle,” wrote Sting for the popular "Police" song; while the odds of finding a message in a bottle from someone or someplace you don’t know is huge, especially if the bottle was found along a remote stretch of the central Oregon coast revealing a message of hope from far off Japan.

Think of being ship-wrecked on a deserted island, and then tossing a message in a bottle out to sea in hopes of someone finding it. Then, one day – after months or even years – someone walks along a beach and finds it. This happened recently when a Eugene family found a message in a bottle that simply read: “Hope you know you are loved.” The message was written on the back of a newspaper ad from a Japan, and dated June 13, 2009.

Message in a bottle worthy of scientific study

According to the Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer in Seattle, Washington -- who’s studied how and why objects have floated across the Pacific Ocean from China and Japan to the West coast of the United States – bottles do find themselves thousands of miles from where they were put into the water because of the trans-Pacific drift.

Ebbesmeyer has used drift bottles and other floating objects to study and model the flow of water across the North Pacific. He has long been in touch with beachcombers along the North American Pacific shores looking for items which might aid him in his research, states a background paper produced by this oceanographer.

Moreover, the scientists states that “in drift-bottle studies, large releases have ranged from 21,600 to 148,400 bottles, but generally the releases have been smaller, under 1000 bottles that have made its way across the Pacific.”

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