What started out as a school project for Curtis Kipple ended with him breaking a record!
Last March, 11-year-old Kipple wrote a letter about himself and sent it adrift into the Atlantic Ocean just off the coast of the state of New York. Last week, the letter was found by 25-year-old Ana Ponte of Azores, Portugal. The bottle had traveled 2,600 miles (4,190km), making it the farthest that any message has ever traveled by bottle in an ocean.
Kipple’s teacher, Chris Albrecht, thought the exercise would be good for teaching both formal letter writing and geography. “Curtis had tears in his eyes when I told him the news,” Mr Albrecht told the BBC News.
Take that, Twitter! Message in a bottle is clearly the best form of communication. And yes, we have this song stuck in our heads, too: