Hey Crew- more great news from our 2015 trip to the North Pole and back! Another little wooden float boat that we deployed atop the Arctic ice pack on our way back from the pole has been recovered. (Here's the story of the float boat project: https://www.polartrec.com/expeditions/us-arctic-geotraces/journals/2015-09-16) This is the second recovery, joining the first by also washing up in Iceland. The first boat was found this past December near Reykjavík (story here: https://www.polartrec.com/expeditions/us-arctic-geotraces/journals/2018-12-05), while this one was picked up in the extreme northeast part of the island country. Here's the exciting message we got:
Hello! One of your floatboats was found at Harðbaksvík, NE Iceland, April the 16th 2019; co-ordinates very close to 66,5150 N and 15,994040 W. Greetings from Kópasker, Iceland, Guðmundur Örn Benediktsson
Guðmundur was kind enough to send along photos of the weathered little boat. Hopefully we can match this up from its unique pattern of knots in the wood and from the position of the brand to figure out which student decorated it prior to deployment and which of the 6 boxes it was in. It seems most likely that it was from box 1 or 2, which were deployed on 12 Sept. 2015, at approx. 86.70 N, 149.48 W. (Boxes 3&4 and 5&6 were dropped later in the cruise and farther south, and their accompanying drift buoys show them heading south towards grounding in N. Canada. The first boat recovery show that at least some of the 1&2 batch got caught up in the Trans-Polar Drift and exited the Arctic Ocean through the Fram Strait between Greenland and Svalbard.)
If we get updated information about the boat's details I'll let everyone know! Congrats to Guðmundur for finding this long-distance drifter and thanks for tracking us down to share the news! Thanks also to Janet Warburton at ARCUS for fielding the email.
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