Student Project At Springside Chestnut Hill Academy Teaching Valuable Lesson Amid Coronavirus Pandemic
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Wednesday is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. To mark the occasion, we've decided to air a story that was shot before the coronavirus outbreak and before Pennsylvania school buildings were closed for the rest of the academic year.
It's a success story five years in the making.
A local school's project finally paid off in a surprising way and now, amid the coronavirus pandemic, is providing another teachable moment.
Of course, the idea has been romanticized over the years, through countless songs and works of fiction.
But this is real life and at the end of the day, this project is highlighting a real problem.
As far as scientific instruments go these are as low-tech as they come. A simple scroll in a bottle that will be launched into the ocean as a way to learn about its currents.
"This is the Message in a Bottle Project," senior Sabrina Wang said. "It's part of the Oceanography course."
"We end up putting them in the ocean off the coast of Maine," senior Kevin Buck said.
For five years, students at Philadelphia's Springside Chestnut Hill Academy have been reaching out hoping their very Philly messages on school letterhead find someone who will respond.
"I wrote about the Philly sports teams, like the Sixers," Buck said. "I'm a big Sixers and Eagles fans."
After all, the lesson works best when students can plot where a bottle has traveled.
"We have close to 80 and 100 bottles that have gone out over the last five years," science teacher Dr. Kim Eberle-Wang said.
But the rate of return is very low, only about 4%.
One bottle washed ashore in Maine soon after its launch in 2015, likely riding small currents back to the East Coast.
Same for two bottles that were discovered on Long Island in 2018.
Still, Dr. Eberle-Wang has considered that a success.
That is until this year when someone sent the school a stunning message.
"I don't think any of us could really believe it," Dr. Eberle-Wang said. "It was in Cuba. Not Cuba, New York, but the island of Cuba."
For the first time, a bottle had hitched a ride on the powerful gulf stream and made its way all the way around the Atlantic Ocean, landing in Cuba.
A French-Canadian couple vacationing in Cuba found the bottle and popped the cork at the beachside bar.
"Everyone joined them and they tried to decipher what it actually said," Dr. Eberle-Wang said.
Turns out, the letter is one of the school's oldest, written by a student in the very first oceanography class in 2014.
"When hearing back that we got a response five years later, that was kinda crazy," senior Steve Majewski said.
"Six thousand miles I would have to travel to get to Cuba," Buck said.
And that is an impressive message of a different kind.
"Because our bottles are able to travel along this current, it also means any plastic waste is able to travel along that current," Wang said. "You don't even need to throw it into the ocean. If you're driving and you throw something out your window, it's gonna end up in the storm drain, through the streams and it will end up there."
And that possibility provides a sobering reminder amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Litter, involving used gloves people are wearing around the nation, has been plaguing communities all over the country.
Those discarded gloves can get into our waterways and travel to oceans far and wide just like the bottle that ended up in Cuba.