The bottle containing a letter from 1984 was discovered by a 9-year-old girl in Hawaii 37 years after high school students in Japan threw it into the sea as part of a scientific experiment.
According to CNN, the students wrote the “Ocean Current Investigation” letter, which was then placed in a bottle and thrown into the Croatia current near the island of Miyajima in western Japan as part of a school program on ocean currents.
The letter, dated July 1984, was stuffed inside, asking the person who found the bottle to return it to Sushi High School.
The 9-year-old girl who discovered the bottle, Abhay Graham, was on a family visit to a beach near the Hilo city of Hawaii when she accidentally discovered it, according to local media in Hawaii. The letter traveled 4,350 miles over a distance of about 7,000 km after being swept away by the waves.
The high school said in a press release that it released 450 bottles in 1984 and another 300 bottles in 1985 as part of its seawater survey.
So far, 51 bottles have been found and returned, however, this is the only bottle discovered since 2002.
Other bottles were found in the state of Washington in the United States, Canada, the Philippines and the Marshall Islands in the Central Pacific Ocean.
Mayumi Kanda, who was a member of the Science Club when she joined the school in 1984, was surprised to see the bottle reappear after a long hiatus.
Kanda added that the news “rekindled his high school nostalgia”.
Sushi High School thanked its students for returning the letter and confirmed that they would like to write to Graham.
“Creator. Award-winning problem solver. Music evangelist. Incurable introvert.”
