R. Mark Leckie Weighs in on How a Painting in a Bottle Made It from Maine to Bermuda

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Stumbling upon a message in a bottle is strange enough but add to that a trans-Atlantic connection and some UMass science, and you have a real story on your hands. After taking a walk on the beach, Katie Trimingham, a resident of Bermuda—an isolated island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean—found a glass bottle with something inside. One might expect a written message, based on the old cliché, but this bottle communication took the form of a painting.  

The artist, Dennis Wade from Greenfield, MA, said that the painting is one of four that he cast into the sea off the coast of Maine, and the only one that has been found.  Trimingham and Wade connected and shared a love for the painting, which features an ocean view and pink roses.  

This story—heartwarming though it may be—poses an intriguing scientific question: how did a bottle drift all the way from New England to Bermuda? R. Mark Leckie, a geographer, paleo-oceanographer, and a professor at the College of Natural Sciences' Department of Earth, Geographic, and Climate Sciences, recently spoke with The Greenfield Recorder about how ocean currents led to the bottle (and the painting within) landing on the island.  

Leckie suspects that the bottle was taken up in the south-flowing Labrador current, that flows from the Arctic Ocean and along the coast of the Canadian region of Labrador, and then intersected one of the eddies associated with the Gulf Stream, which likely spun the bottle in the direction of Bermuda in the Sargasso Sea—the only sea without a land boundary.  

He does find it strange, however, that it ended up in Bermuda: “Bermuda is quite a way off from the coast,” Leckie expressed to The Greenfield Recorder.

Trimingham and Wade have been in contact and hope to one day meet each other in person after being connected through this unlikely journey across the Atlantic. What began as a painting in a bottle became a story of interconnectedness and strong ocean currents.  

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