Florida Student's Message In Bottle Washes Up In Ireland

 

There's e-mail , there's snail mail  -  and now there's sail mail.

A father and his son in Ireland discovered a bottle containing a message  written by a Florida high-school student that traveled some 3,720 miles after being tossed into the Atlantic Ocean more than a year ago.

The remarkable journey of the message in a bottle began in a classroom of Melbourne , Fla. , marine science  teacher Ethan Hall, who every year demonstrates the flow of the Gulf Stream by having his students cast bottles into the sea.In  past years , the bottles have followed the current as far north as Rhode Island , but one message in abottle written by  student Corey Swearingen drifted all the way to Ireland.

"I would tease the students that maybe you'll find a nice Irish pen pal or Moroccan date to the prom, but it hadn't happen in four years . So this certainly has been exciting ," Hall told   Florida News.

Swearingen's  message as those written  by his classmates , were dumped from a charter fishing boat into the Gulf Stream about 20 miles off Port Canaveral, Fla. , on Aprill 22, 2009. Over the next 16 months , the green glass bottle - which contained a  message explaing the science experiment and urging anyone who might find it to contact Hall. - drifted across the Altantic before washing up on the shore outside Keating's Pub in Kilbaha , a tiny fishing village in County Clare, Ireland.Thats where 17-year-old Adam Flannery and his father , Stephen, discovered the corked bottle. "Our reaction on finding the bottle was surprise to find it intact , as the beach it was washed up on is a pebble beach," Stephen Flannery told the press in an e-mail . "Then excitement of seeing the message inside the bottle  '08-116' clearly visible."

Flannery wasn't the only  person  excited by the discovery . Sweartingen , who has since graduated high school and now attends  Florida Altantic University in Boca Rato, Fla. , told CNN he was  "excited and amazed" that his bottle had been found . The 18-year -old said he learned something from the experiment. "I learned that the Gulf goes really , really far away."

My take : I  hope we all learned something from the message in the bottle and the Gulf Stream. How we treat our oceans and what we dump in them will eventually end up in other parts of the world ....the BP spill in the Gulf  will affect our  planet for years to come ...people wake up , Global Warming  is here. Planetary climate change is taking place. Let's help  the cause by re-cycling  everything we can, cutting back on energy and fuel consumption, trying to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions and lobbying our government to make sweeping changes to our environmental policy.

Canadian Migratory Birds Being Killed By Oil Spill

ST.JOHNS - A Memorial University professor says migratory birds that return to Newfoundland and Labrador each year are being killed by oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. Every spring tens of thousands of white gannets circle the bluffs of the Cape St. Mary's Bird Sanctuary, southwest of St. John's. There are also large gannet colonies in Quebec. They come north to nest, lay eggs and raise their chicks.

Many of them migrate from the southern U.S., where the BP well has been spilling millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico since April 20.
"We know our birds are dying there," said professor and seabird researcher Bill Montevecchi.
"You know, we can feel the long reach of that oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, here in Eastern Canada. What we do know is that some of our gannets are being oiled and the birds I've seen [pictures of from the Gulf of Mexico] are so heavily oiled that they are going to sink in a day or two."

Montevecchi and other bird scientists are planning to attach satellite tags to some birds in Newfoundland this summer in order to track them and see how they fare when they return to the Gulf next fall.
"It seems to me it's just responsible to find out what's happening to our birds that are going back there from eastern Canada."
He worries birds that head south from Canada will land in oily water in the Gulf and die.
"Going by the birds I've seen already, the most humane thing to do would be euthanasia. They are so covered with oil there is no way they are going to survive. It's a total assault on their body. It shuts down their oil glands. They ingest it, they absorb it. You can clean them on the outside but they are dying on the inside," said Montevecchi.
He said there is also fear that the oil spill in the Gulf may harm marine mammals, such as humpback whales, that come to Eastern Canada annually. The Cape St. Mary's Bird Sanctuary is a popular tourist attraction in the spring and summer months when gannets are there.
"It's really quite a tragedy that I hadn't contemplated until we arrived here," said John Carol of Milton, Ont., who was at the sanctuary on Wednesday. "What it really points out is the international implications of a disaster thousands of miles away."....The blot on the planet keeps spreading.