Call it a message in a bottle for an age of melting ice caps. When polar explorer Joergen Amundsen buried a wristwatch under the icy wastes of the Arctic, he could not have expected it to go on its own incredible journey. Yet the watch left at the North Pole three years ago has now been found by a boy more than 1800 miles to the south.
Niels Jakup Mortensen, 11, spotted a small black box last week near his home in Famijns after it floated ashore near his home, a village of 115 people on Suduroy, the southernmost of the Faroe Islands.
Inside, Mortensen found a wristwatch buried by Amundsen, who is a descendant of the famed Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen, during a trek to the North Pole in 2004. Amundsen had produced 250 copies of a wristwatch he designed to withstand extreme conditions in the Arctic, and buried one of them in memory of his ancestor.
Niels's mother, Anna Jacobsen, says the watch is accompanied by a letter from Amundsen, which is partly damaged by sea water. She looked Amundsen up on the internet, where she found details about the watch.
"It was so unbelievable," says Jacobsen. "It had been buried in the North Pole. We discussed it for hours."
Hjalmar Hatun, an oceanographer with the Faroese Fisheries Laboratory, said it was "very likely" that the wristwatch had drifted south with one of the chunks of ice that frequently break away at the North Pole and are carried off by the ocean currents.
The Faroes, an 18-island Danish territory, are located halfway between Scotland and Iceland.
Despite the obvious conclusion that the melting ice caps were behind the incredible journey, Hatun says that ice breaking off at the North Pole was not always related to global warming.
The phenomenon was first observed more than 100 years ago by another Norwegian polar explorer, Fridtjof Nansen. "So in that sense, the fact that objects from the North Pole can drift south is old news," Hatun says.
Try telling that to Niels Mortensen. Amundsen was quoted by a Faroese daily newspaper as saying the boy could keep the watch. The remaining 249 watches have been put up for sale at an average of £10,000. Not a bad day's work for an 11-year-old beachcomber.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article