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.