I’m assuming they tend to drift towards shores because people find those messages, but I don’t know what percentage of messages are never found because they’re still drifting in the oceans.
In: Physics
They drift randomly however whenever that random pattern intersects a shore they wash up and their journey ends. It’s not that they tend to drift to shore it’s that they always end on the shore and we only encounter them at the end.
Like everything else floating in the ocean, where a bottle end up is the result of a complex interaction between waves, wind and currents.
Nothing makes things specifically go to shore, and we will never know how many of such messages are never found. Probably they are not nearly as common as cartoons make you think.
But if a bottle’s journey is at an end when it hits the shore, most random movements will sooner or later hit a shoreline somewhere and thus give the impression they drift there.
They drift randomly what you are thinking of is a specialised form of survivorship bias the ones that randomly make it to shore are the ones that don’t stay in the middle of the ocean or sink to the bottom. https://youtu.be/geOdDSs0tjY
You only hear about the ones that come ashore, there cod be many many more drifting about aimlessly, or sunk to the bottom of the ocean
Actually no, people didnt find those mesaages and once they made an study and throw several in an island and no one found one until several decades later
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