It turns out the message in a bottle that Kugluktuk resident David Peter Norberg found on Aug. 11 was dropped into the Arctic Ocean by crew aboard the icebreaker Louis St. Laurent.
The bottle was released only 100 km from Kugluktuk, just southeast of Lady Franklin Point in October 2010, according to Humphrey Melling, a research scientist with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), which oversees the Drift Bottle Project.
Read: Kugluktuk man finds message in a bottle after nine years
Although the DFO's office that organizes the Drift Bottle Project is based in Sidney, B.C., and the message inside was from a female student residing in that British Columbia community, the bottle was among a group loaded onto the icebreaker for dispersal in the Arctic Ocean.
It took nine years for it to be located. The DFO reports that only one in every 25 bottles is recovered. The others either sink, end up buried in sand, wash up in places where nobody visits, or leak enough that the note inside becomes illegible.
The unfound bottles eventually break down and become part of the marine environment, the DFO states.
