# Message in a bottle question **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 21, 2007, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/message-in-a-bottle-question/420017 "2007-09-21T18:38:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![MrSquishy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b9e5f3/32.png) [@MrSquishy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrSquishy)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2007, 6:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/message-in-a-bottle-question/420017/1 "2007-09-21T18:38:05Z")
I’m not really sure if there is a GQ answer for this or not: Is a bottle, thrown into the ocean, guaranteed to eventually wash up on shore somewhere? That is, if I dropped a bottle at the point in the Earth’s oceans furthest from any shore (side question: where is that?), would it eventually wash up somewhere? Or could it conceivably float forever without making landfall? ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2007, 6:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/message-in-a-bottle-question/420017/2 "2007-09-21T18:47:57Z")
I’ll bet there’s a good chance that it’d get snagged in the Sargasso sea or someplace similar. It doesn’t HAVE to wash up on land. Or its seal could fail and it’s fill with water and sink, which is a lot more likely. By the way – if you put a message in a bottle and heave it into the water, it won’t float cork-upmost (as it does in drawings and the movies) unless you ballast the bottom. Your garden-variety bottle floats bottom-uppermost, probably because that’s the biggest part, and it’s full of air. (We’ve done this ourselves). This increases the likelihood of seal failure. ---
**Author:** ![MrSquishy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b9e5f3/32.png) [@MrSquishy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrSquishy)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2007, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/message-in-a-bottle-question/420017/3 "2007-09-21T18:53:36Z")
Ah, OK, good points. That’s interesting about a bottle tending to float upside down, but it makes perfect sense when you think about it. Geez, are there any cartoon clichés that are actually true? For the sake of argument, let’s forget the bottle and say it’s a surfboard, or something that infallibly floats. I guess your point about it getting snagged on some vegetation still stands. ---
**Author:** ![aldiboronti](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9fc348/32.png) [@aldiboronti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aldiboronti)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2007, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/message-in-a-bottle-question/420017/4 "2007-09-21T18:56:59Z")
[QUOTE=MrSquishy] That is, if I dropped a bottle at the point in the Earth’s oceans furthest from any shore (side question: where is that?), would it eventually wash up somewhere? [/QUOTE] > [@](#): > > The Pacific pole of inaccessibility (also called Point Nemo), the point in the ocean farthest from any land, lies in the South Pacific Ocean at 48°52.6′S, 123°23.6′W, which is approximately 2688 km (1670 mi) from the nearest land (equidistant from Ducie Island in the Pitcairn Islands to the north, Maher Island off Siple Island near Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica to the south and Motu Nui off Rapa Nui in the north east). It is in the middle of an area of 22,405,411 km² (8,650,778 sq mi) of ocean, larger than the entire former Soviet Union. [Link](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_points_of_the_world) ---
**Author:** ![Fear\_Itself](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fear_itself/32/19637_2.png) [@Fear\_Itself](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fear_Itself)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2007, 7:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/message-in-a-bottle-question/420017/5 "2007-09-21T19:03:21Z")
When I was 14, we stuffed a bunch of notes into two wine bottles that had ceramic stoppers with rubber seals attached to the bottle, like [Grolsch Beer](http://www.grolsch.com/). We took them out to the end of [Huntington Beach Pier](http://www.stockteam.com/hbpier.html) (600 yards from the beach) and heaved them into the ocean. That was almost forty years ago, and we never heard from anybody. Of course, within a decade, all our addresses and phone numbers had changed, so that is not very surprising. I still wonder what happened to them though. ---
**Author:** ![lieu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/c2a13f/32.png) [@lieu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lieu)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2007, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/message-in-a-bottle-question/420017/6 "2007-09-21T19:07:18Z")
_“[The North Pacific sub-tropical gyre](http://www.calvintang.com/blog/2006/11/the-north-pacific-trash-vortex) covers a large area of the Pacific in which the water circulates clockwise in a slow spiral. Winds are light. The currents tend to force any floating material into the low energy central area of the gyre. There are few islands on which the floating material can beach. So it stays there in the gyre, in astounding quantities estimated at six kilos of plastic for every kilo of naturally occurring plankton. The equivalent of an area the size of Texas swirling slowly around like a clock.”_ ---
**Author:** ![tanstaafl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ba8739/32.png) [@tanstaafl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tanstaafl)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2007, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/message-in-a-bottle-question/420017/7 "2007-09-21T19:07:42Z")
Well, some [little rubber ducks](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=464768&in_page_id=1770) have apparently been drifting around the oceans for a decade or so. [Another link, this one actually talks about bottles too.](http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/elements/shoes.htm) ---
**Author:** ![Ike\_Witt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ike_witt/32/283_2.png) [@Ike\_Witt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ike_Witt)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2007, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/message-in-a-bottle-question/420017/8 "2007-09-21T19:07:53Z")
I remember reading something a few years ago about things lost at sea. The story was mainly about containers falling off of cargo ships. The story was saying that if you knew where something fell off the ship, there are accurate computer models that will tell you where and when the stuff will start washing ashore. I want to say that I read about this after a bunch of Nikes started washing up in, IIRC, Alaska. [This book](http://www.amazon.com/Tracking-Trash-Flotsam-Science-Scientists/dp/0618581316) sounds like it covers what I was thinking of. ---
**Author:** ![Bearflag70](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Bearflag70](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bearflag70)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2007, 8:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/message-in-a-bottle-question/420017/9 "2007-09-21T20:03:11Z")
[QUOTE=lieu] _“[The North Pacific sub-tropical gyre](http://www.calvintang.com/blog/2006/11/the-north-pacific-trash-vortex) covers a large area of the Pacific in which the water circulates clockwise in a slow spiral. Winds are light. The currents tend to force any floating material into the low energy central area of the gyre. There are few islands on which the floating material can beach. So it stays there in the gyre, in astounding quantities estimated at six kilos of plastic for every kilo of naturally occurring plankton. The equivalent of an area the size of Texas swirling slowly around like a clock.”_ [/QUOTE] That’s cool. I think I’ll put a message in a bottle in San Francisco, send it off, then come back to pick it up later.