From Watts Up With That?

Brief Note by Kip Hansen

To close out the year, I thought I’d mention an item from the Shipping News. 

Five Decades at Sea: ‘Argo Merchant’ Oil Spill Drift Card Turns Up on Scottish Isle

“A plastic drift card from one of America’s most significant oil spills [the wreck of the Argo Merchant off of Nantucket Island in 1976] has surfaced on a Scottish beach after nearly five decades at sea.”

“Barbara Payne, while cleaning debris from her property on Scotland’s Isle of Coll following an October 2024 storm, found a red, credit-card sized plastic item with instructions in multiple languages to contact NOAA in Boulder, Colorado.”

That’s a Drift Card:  made of plastic, with raised lettering. This one has been at sea for 48 years and traveled almost 3,000 miles. Somewhere on it, it has an identifying number – which allowed it to be traced back to the site of the 1976 Argo Merchant spill site. 

This is not the only drift card that has been at sea for decades – a testimony to their longevity and suitability for purpose. 

NOAA Drift Cards Found 45 Years Later

88,000-mile journey? Plastic card makes landfall in Alaska after 33-year sea voyage

 So, after this kind of success what do you suppose NOAA has done?  Drift cards, NOAA says were “originally plastic but [are] now thin, biodegradable pieces of wood, colored with bright non-toxic paint”. 

And when did they make the change?  I couldn’t find out.  I tried, fairly hard.  Even the famed Perplexity couldn’t find out any closer than I did, returning this:

“NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration (OR&R) has transitioned from using plastic drift cards to biodegradable wooden ones, but the exact date of this change is not explicitly stated in the search results. However, we can infer that this transition occurred sometime after the 1970s and before 2005. The search results indicate that:

    In the past, NOAA used plastic drift cards. For example, a plastic drift card released in 1976 near Nantucket, Massachusetts was recently found 48 years later.

    More recently, NOAA has been using “thin, biodegradable pieces of wood, colored with bright non-toxic paint” as drift cards.

     In 2005, during the Safe Sanctuaries pollution response drill in Florida, [wooden] drift cards were already being used as part of the exercise.

    The transition from plastic to wooden drift cards likely occurred gradually as environmental concerns about plastic pollution grew. NOAA made this change to reduce the environmental impact of their studies, as the wooden cards are biodegradable and painted with non-toxic paint. While we don’t have an exact date for when NOAA completely phased out plastic drift cards in favor of wooden ones, it’s clear that this change was implemented sometime between the late 1970s and the early 2000s.”

In any case, plastic cards used up through at least 1976 have been replaced, at some unknown time since with wooden ones.

The claim, the boast even, is that they are biodegradable.  Even more environmentally correct, they are painted with non-toxic paint. Biodegradability means that the drift cards will degrade at sea. The non-toxic paint guarantees that sea life, plant and animal, will colonize the wooden cards, eating into and degrading the paint.  That’s why “bottom paint” for boats are all toxic to some degree.

My question to readers:

Is the new-and-improved, biodegradable, non-toxic-painted drift card likely to be an improvement over the 1970s-style plastic cards?

# # # # #

Author’s Comment:

My opinion, NO.  I could be wrong there, but I don’t think so.

If they no longer want drift cards to last decades at sea, then the wooden ones, if they are still readable after their intended lifetime, would at least not be worse. 

But if drift cards are meant for serious science, then I would have thought it far better to have them last, still floating and in readable condition, for as long as possible.  So far, 48 years is the record for a drift card. 

There was, however, a [non-biodegradable] drift bottle found after 98 years.

Thanks for reading,

And may 2025 be a good year for you and yours.

# # # # #