Boat Found: Northern Coast of Norway

Wooden boat found in Sør-Rekvikbukta, Arnøya, Nord-Norge

Date	May 23, 2022
Place Found	Sør-Rekvikbukta, Arnøya, Nord-Norge Red square on maps.
Found by	Guro Kvåle Fredriksen
Date Deployed	August 3, 2020
Who Deployed	KV Svalbard cruise with CAATEX team
Deployment Location	​83.953551°N 28.008752°E Green circle on maps.
Track taken	See second map below. To follow other boat/buoy tracks, the boat/buoy tracks from 2020 KV Svalbard and other ice breakers see this map.

So just how did a wooden boat deployed on an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean (at the green circle) end up on the north coast of Norway (at the red square)?

• The colored squiggles on the map below show the actual tracks of drifting buoys. Notice how the buoys tend to follow the underlying currents. The wooden boat probably drifted south in the East Greenland Current, then hit the North Atlantic Current and was carried northward into the Norwegian Current, which took it to the northern tip of Norway.

• While the straight-line distance from start to end is about 1,500 km (900 miles), the actual distance the boat drifted is probably about 12,000 km (7500 miles).”

More Hypothesizing

We estimate the drift of the wooden boat to be approximately 6000 miles, which is about 10,000 km. At an average current speed of approximately 15 cm/s, it would take about 2 years to drift 10,000 km which in synch with our drift hypothesis.

The decorated boat before being deployed from the SV Svalbard on August 3, 2020.

The boat found in Norway on May 23, 2022 was decorated in 2020 during the Pacific Science Center’s Climate Change Curiosity Expo in Seattle, Washington, USA by a student from University Child Development School.