A wristwatch buried by a Norwegian watchmaker at the North Pole three years ago traveled thousands of miles and was found last week. Niels Jakup Mortensen, 11, discovered the watch near his home at the Faeroe Islands, more than 1800 miles from the North Pole.

According to Mortensen's mother the watch was enclosed in a small black box along with a letter that had been partially damaged by sea water, the Associated Press reports.

Internet research revealed that the watch was one of the 250 that Joergen Amundsen, a descendant of famed Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, carried with him during a trek to the North Pole in 2004 to test their capacity to withstand extreme weather conditions.

All the wristwatches were brought back except one, numbered 001/250, which Joergen buried in the memory of Roald Amundsen, says the company Website.

According to Hjalmar Hatun, an oceanographer with the Faeroese Fisheries Laboratory, the wristwatch might have drifted south with one of the chunks of ice that frequently break away at the North Pole and are carried off by the ocean currents, he told the Associated Press.

"So in that sense, the fact that objects from the North Pole can drift south is old news," he said.