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While walking on Mulranny Beach in Ireland’s Mayo county on Sunday, Keith McGreal saw a blue plastic barrel hitting the shore like a message in a bottle.
Instead of a tightly-wrapped letter inside, stickers affixed to the dirty edges found a clue to the barrel’s origin: “City of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.”
The litter box was 3,500 miles from the house.
“The initial reaction was ‘Wow,'” Mr McGreal, 44, said on Tuesday. “I said, ‘This is not from Ireland.’”
While Mr. McGreal, a security and environmental officer, was spending time with his family that afternoon, he and his children noticed a distant blue object and decided to run towards it.
When they got there, Mr. McGreal noticed that the barrel had inscriptions in English and Spanish indicating that it was probably not from his region.
“It was also covered in goose mussels,” he said. “I explained to the kids that if something was in the ocean for a while like that, those shells had to grow outside. He was obviously in the water for a long time, crossing the sea.”
“It reminded me right away, like a message in a bottle-type script, where maybe you know who the sender is and maybe you can send them a message back,” he added.
That night, he wrote to the city of Myrtle Beach, warning them of the location of the unruly tubs.
Mr McGreal: “It’s incredible to think he’s crossed the Atlantic” wrote in an emailIt was shared online this week by Myrtle Beach’s public information officer, Mark Kruea.
“I looked at the pictures very carefully to see if they looked like our trash can,” Mr Kruea said on Monday. “Then I sent the photos to our beachfront parks and they quickly confirmed, yes, that’s our trash can.”
Mr. Kruea speculated that either wind during a storm or “human interference” caused the trash can to fall into the ocean off South Carolina.
From there, Chris Paternostro, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, speculated that the bin was picked up by the Gulf Stream and transported it to the East Coast and then to Ireland’s west coast.
“This has been among the top 10 things on the Oddities List for over two decades,” said Mr. Kruea.
A post online sharing Mr McGreal’s discovery. Myrtle Beach City Government Facebook page On Monday, a Myrtle Beach resident, Karen Golding, uncovered responses from both sides of the Atlantic, including Vaughan, who sadly said: “I just got back from Mayo 3 weeks ago, if I had known, I would have hitchhiked! ”
This isn’t the first time foreign marine debris has made waves. in 1990, 61,280 Nike sneakers spilled from a freighter during a storm and landed in the Pacific Ocean, eventually washing up in Europe, Bermuda, the Bahamas and elsewhere by 2019. in 1992 a cargo ship unintentionally unloaded 28,000 rubber ducks Ducks making their way to the Pacific – eventually to Maine. For more than three decades, residents of a coastal community in France were stunned by the regular appearance of Garfield phones on their shores until, to their source, a lost shipping container was found. finally spotted in 2019.
Mr. Paternostro said such events can sometimes turn into oceanographic experiments because scientists know when these objects fall into the water and where they’re headed so they can use them to study currents and tides. But a Myrtle Beach litter may not contribute the same to the study of oceanography.
“A litter box in the water with an unknown time and only known origin is a little harder to give us a physical understanding of oceanography,” he said.
Nancy Wallace, director of the Marine Debris Program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the litter could barely scratch the surface of the significant debris it encountered, including discarded furniture, mannequins and lost toothbrushes.
“You find the strangest things in the ocean,” he said.
And while Ms. Wallace noted that the litter box is a good example of how debris that builds up in the ocean can have far-reaching effects, Mr. McGreal recycled the litter box by cleaning it up and leaving it for people to use on Mulranny. Beach.
“They use it for its intended purpose in Ireland,” said Mr. Kruea. “This is pretty cool.”
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