“Message In A Bottle” From Iceland In July Found In Norway On New Year’s Day

A message from an 11-year-old boy in Iceland wandered some 5,000 kilometres across the ocean to Norway, where it was found on the beach by a man walking his dogs.

Calling it a “message in a bottle” is a bit of a misnomer; as can be seen in the photos with this Facebook post, it was actually a specially designed capsule made by Verkís expressly for the task of carrying a paper message for a long time at sea, while also equipped with a GPS device so its path could be traced.

Fréttablaðið reports that the project was launched in cooperation with Verkís, television scientist Ævar Þór Benediktsson and Atli Svavarsson, an 11-year-old boy from Reykjavík. In the letter he put in the capsule, Atli goes into his reasons for starting the project. He sought to prove that garbage thrown into the ocean can travel a very long ways, and wanted to raise awareness of this fact.

“In the year 2017 I founded my #savetheworld project,” Atli writes in part. “It is about going out and pick up trash from the nature. Me and my dad were watching a TV Show called Ævar the Scientist. He said that if everyone would go out and do some picking we could save the world. And that is how I found a name for my project.”

The capsule was launched into Icelandic waters last July. On New Year’s Day, Arnt Eirik Hansen, a resident of the Norwegian town of Berlevåg, found the capsule on the beach while walking his dogs. As can be seen on Verkís’ tracking map of the message, the capsule spent a considerable amount of time bobbing about in the seas between Iceland and the Faroe Islands before finally making up its mind and heading east, and then north.

The letter will soon be sent back to Iceland, thus bringing the project to a close.