Brief Note by Kip Hansen — 30 December 2024 — 650 words
To close out the year, I thought I’d mention an item from the Shipping News.
Five Decades at Sea: ‘Argo Merchant’ Oil Spill Drift Card Turns Up on Scottish Isle
“A plastic drift card from one of America’s most significant oil spills [the wreck of the Argo Merchant off of Nantucket Island in 1976] has surfaced on a Scottish beach after nearly five decades at sea.”
“Barbara Payne, while cleaning debris from her property on Scotland’s Isle of Coll following an October 2024 storm, found a red, credit-card sized plastic item with instructions in multiple languages to contact NOAA in Boulder, Colorado.”
That’s a Drift Card: made of plastic, with raised lettering. This one has been at sea for 48 years and traveled almost 3,000 miles. Somewhere on it, it has an identifying number – which allowed it to be traced back to the site of the 1976 Argo Merchant spill site.
This is not the only drift card that has been at sea for decades – a testimony to their longevity and suitability for purpose.
NOAA Drift Cards Found 45 Years Later
88,000-mile journey? Plastic card makes landfall in Alaska after 33-year sea voyage
So, after this kind of success what do you suppose NOAA has done? Drift cards, NOAA says were “originally plastic but [are] now thin, biodegradable pieces of wood, colored with bright non-toxic paint”.
And when did they make the change? I couldn’t find out. I tried, fairly hard. Even the famed Perplexity couldn’t find out any closer than I did, returning this:
“NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration (OR&R) has transitioned from using plastic drift cards to biodegradable wooden ones, but the exact date of this change is not explicitly stated in the search results. However, we can infer that this transition occurred sometime after the 1970s and before 2005. The search results indicate that:
In the past, NOAA used plastic drift cards. For example, a plastic drift card released in 1976 near Nantucket, Massachusetts was recently found 48 years later.
More recently, NOAA has been using “thin, biodegradable pieces of wood, colored with bright non-toxic paint” as drift cards.
In 2005, during the Safe Sanctuaries pollution response drill in Florida, [wooden] drift cards were already being used as part of the exercise.
The transition from plastic to wooden drift cards likely occurred gradually as environmental concerns about plastic pollution grew. NOAA made this change to reduce the environmental impact of their studies, as the wooden cards are biodegradable and painted with non-toxic paint. While we don’t have an exact date for when NOAA completely phased out plastic drift cards in favor of wooden ones, it’s clear that this change was implemented sometime between the late 1970s and the early 2000s.”
In any case, plastic cards used up through at least 1976 have been replaced, at some unknown time since with wooden ones.
The claim, the boast even, is that they are biodegradable. Even more environmentally correct, they are painted with non-toxic paint. Biodegradability means that the drift cards will degrade at sea. The non-toxic paint guarantees that sea life, plant and animal, will colonize the wooden cards, eating into and degrading the paint. That’s why “bottom paint” for boats are all toxic to some degree.
My question to readers:
Is the new-and-improved, biodegradable, non-toxic-painted drift card likely to be an improvement over the 1970s-style plastic cards?
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Author’s Comment:
My opinion, NO. I could be wrong there, but I don’t think so.
If they no longer want drift cards to last decades at sea, then the wooden ones, if they are still readable after their intended lifetime, would at least not be worse.
But if drift cards are meant for serious science, then I would have thought it far better to have them last, still floating and in readable condition, for as long as possible. So far, 48 years is the record for a drift card.
There was, however, a [non-biodegradable] drift bottle found after 98 years.
Thanks for reading,
And may 2025 be a good year for you and yours.
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Interesting. I’d never heard of “drift cards.”
I suspect that there are multiple types of drift cards, made of varying materials, depending on their purposes. This paper mentions using “Plastic drift cards with the same buoyancy as propagules of Avicennia marina … [as] an indicator of possible mangrove dispersal by ocean currents.”
T. D. Steinke & C. J. Ward (2003) Use of Plastic Drift Cards As Indicators of Possible Dispersal of Propagules of the Mangrove Avicennia Marina by Ocean Currents, African Journal of Marine Science, 25:1, 169-176, DOI:10.2989/18142320309504007
Here’s another article about this drift card:
https://blog.response.restoration.noaa.gov/drift-card-used-track-1976-oil-spill-found-48-years-later
Not to mention notes in bottles.
https://youtu.be/MbXWrmQW-OE
This dates me…
Yeah, but it’s still a great number! Doesn’t Sting look young?
Interesting, will check out the paper. Also interesting point about Avicennia mangrove seeds is they get washed inland in the Gulf of Mexico where they even grow better in lower salinities, but can’t stand freezes. There is even a Bay de Mongles eight miles inland from the central Louisiana coast. Early French settlers didn’t like them as do egrets which find it difficult to feed. Been known for centuries that lots of river wood full of critters inside and outside ends up in South Texas for campfires and difficulties driving down the beach. Some gets covered up and disappears.
Lugo-Fernández, et al. 2001. Gulf of Mexico historic (1955-1987) surface drifter data analysis. Journal of Coastal Research. 17(1):1-16.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4300145
“Five clusters of high drifter recoveries evident in both seasons were identified: 1) south Texas; 2) Louisiana-Texas border; 3) Mississippi River Delta to Cape San BIas, Florida; 4) Tampa, west Florida; and 5) southern to eastern Florida…..Recovered drifters in selected segments in the eastern Gulf received drifters released primarily in the eastern Gulf, whereas western areas received drifters from everywhere.” They also used corked bottles and plastic ones that looked like jellyfish, but were a distraction on research vessels.
Could be a good project for the UK ARIA mob to test whether ocean currents are slowing.
Might take too long to finish the experiment so maybe a supercomputer model using digital drift cards might work instead. They could verify their model by checking whether all of their digital floaters gather together in a clump in the middle of the ocean, as they should!
This MAY help.
Neither plastic or wood or wooden as a suffix gave any result, but “drift card” gave as per link below
The falloff pre 1990 and new peak post 2000 may be reflected in the linked literature.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=plastic+drift+card%2Cwooden+drift+card%2Cdrift+card&year_start=1920&year_end=2022&corpus=en-US&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true
My first thought was how long would a wooden drift card last, basically untreated for a marine environment wood. Presumably not 40 years.
You would think that the ‘biodegradable’ guarantees no more drift cards will ever be found. But perhaps NOAA pundits forgot to look in the dictionary for the meaning of the word.
is it common ‘these days’ to have a relatively long article related to the use of an obscure item and not explain that obscure item’s function/
Are they used to measure drift?
Why name them “drift cards” if you need to explain the function?
Coach ==> Ah, sorry, I included a NOAA link to the whole subject of Drift Card studies….maybe I shouldn’t rely on links alone.
Is there useful information from a drift card that’s been at sea for 40+ years? The Gulf Stream moves at an average of around 3.5 knots or 3.5 nautical miles/hour. A drift card floated entirely within the stream it should move across the Atlantic in roughly 36 days. Given that prevailing winds in the north Atlantic are westerly and the further north the stronger they get, that would reduce the transit time even more.
(that is why Christopher Columbus “invented” what became the standard trans-Atlantic sailing route during the age of sail …. from western Europe, head southwest until you hit the northeast trades, follow the winds across to North America … on the return trip, head north into the westerlies and the Gulf Stream and ride that back to Europe)
So a drift card set adrift just off the east coast of North America spending 40 some years at sea, means that it must have been trapped in the gyres that are part of the AMOC for likely many years, going around and around and around. So is there scientific value in seeing evidence of that? I dunno.
My first thought on reading this post was, “Why use a drift card that you know is biodegradable with non-toxic paint that is pretty much guaranteed to last no more than a few years on the surface of the ocean (where it is exposed to sunlight and the seawater is well oxygenated)?”
But if the information that is yielded from these cards is intended to be short term anyway, then sure, make them biodegradable.
Duane ==> Yes, it should be a matter of intended use and intended lifespan. But looks like an attempt to avoid having it pointed out that NOAA is adding to “plastic pollution”.
The card was found 40 years later.
That doesn’t in any way mean it drifted for 40 years.
I suppose it’s possible that somebody found it, stored it away for 40+ years, then released it within the Gulf Stream. But that doesn’t really matter to the point of Kip’s post, which is the longevity of drift cards and their intended purpose of cataloging how long it takes to be recovered on the other side of the Atlantic.
Yes, I think such is just a curiosity after a few years if that long.
I recall after the big tsunami in Japan that triggered the Fukushima nuclear “embarrassment” that some debris washed out to sea reached Alaska and was colonized with various critters from Asia that weren’t welcome here.
Perhaps one thing driving the change to wood is to prevent side effects like that.
What is the goal of drift cards? If it’s to help understand and treat effects of dispersed oil, wooden cards might make sense. If it’s to help understand sea surface currents, why focus on oil spills – shouldn’t they be released everywhere?
I’m a bit disappointed with the comments here embracing the notion that the changeover is to hide or prevent the collection of interesting data. I’m sure had this post claimed that we only study sea surface currents by tracking cards released at a few points, then there would be comments pointing out that we need to look at many more starting points than just oil spills.
Ric ==> The NOAA links lead to a lot of pages about drifter programs — using both drift cards and drift buoys of various types.
Of course, all plastic is non toxic because it’s not bio degradeable. You can eat it and nothing happens. It passes right through you.
Unpopular though true
Reminds me of a story I read once.
A container ship lost one its containers full of rubber ducks. “They” used the rubber ducks to track the currents.
(I think it was in the Pacific.)
Another involved a container of athletic shoes. Both were China to US shipments, IIRC.
I highly, highly doubt that this card was really at sea for 48 years. The ocean would have destroyed it if it had been. It was probably buried somewhere on the Scottish coast and exposed by the storm.
Odds are on your side, but why wreck a good story. Better to say we’ll never know for sure.
Fascinating story, brings back memories of my youth wandering the beach at low tide..
Just because it was found 48 years later does not automatically mean that is was floating around for 48 years. It could just as easily floated for 4 weeks, washed up and was covered by stuff for 48 years.
I am curious as to how many total drift cards were launched vs how many recovered?
There’s a contract supplier, and probably a subcontractor, who sells these things to NOAA. This should be public record.
For 2025, if the records can be found, I predict that those documents will show that the wooden cards are not made in the U.S., nor from U.S. forest products, that they cost more than the plastic kind, and that the original contract change of material came from a) a U.S. university in b) a state that is politically repesented by a stakeholder in one or more of the contracted companies.
I’ll also predict that there will not be any recorded case of wildlife harmed by a plastic drift card.