Plastic Discs Keep Returning home

Oceanographer Tom Weingartner figured that yellow drifter had hitched a ride on an ice floe and sailed north. It then—for more than a decade—spun in a current known as the Beaufort Gyre near the North Pole. Eventually, the ice raft made it through Fram Strait. The ice melted, but the disc floated on, riding the North Atlantic drift, to the Outer Hebrides beach where the boys found it in 1997.

Back then, when the internet was becoming quite useful, the boys contacted someone at the Geophysical Institute. Matthews’ study was long since over (he wrote that his results suggested that oil spilled under ice in winter would tend to move toward the shore), but Roberta Greenlee of the Geophysical Institute sent the Scottish brothers an American dollar.

Just because the study is finished does not mean the plastic is. The disc Ben Jones carried in has weathered forty arctic winters. It lasted much longer than the numbered oranges a scientist threw on the ice during a similar, unsuccessful experiment in 1972. Jones’ yellow plastic disc does not look much different than when Matthews released it on the pack ice in 1979.

The same cannot be said for the northern Alaska coast where the pilot found the disc. Jones and his colleagues have studied Drew Point for the past decade or so, watching colossal frozen chunks of tundra fall into the sea. In the most drastic year they measured, 2016, the sea consumed an average of seventy-two feet of a 5.5-mile stretch of coast around Drew Point.

Though Jones posed for a photo with the disc, he still has possession of the object that was dropped onto the ice the year he was born. He was happy to solve the mystery of where it came from but is holding out on its return.

“Accounting for inflation, if the disc was deployed in 1979 with a stated award of $1, in today’s market the equivalent reward would be about $3.46,” he wrote in an email.