Scientists have developed a new technique to reconstruct the path and source of debris from flight MH370, which disappeared over the Indian Ocean in 2014 with 239 passengers on board.
How it’s described in magazines Progress of AGUIt involves analyzing barnacle shell chemistry to determine environmental conditions such as temperature and ocean drift conditions at which marine organisms grow.
Researchers, including Gregory Herbert of the University of South Florida, began working on the idea after seeing photographs of plane debris that washed ashore on Reunion Island off the coast of Africa a year after the crash.
“The Flaperon was covered in barnacles. When I saw that, I immediately started emailing investigators, knowing that the geochemistry of the shells could be a clue to the crash site. said Dr. Herbert.
Organisms with shells, such as barnacles, grow their shells daily to form layers that resemble annual rings. The chemical nature of each layer is determined by the temperature of the surrounding water when it is formed.
Over the past two decades, scientists have developed and refined methods to extract the ocean temperature that is stored in the chemical structure of invertebrate shells.
In a new study, researchers used live barnacles to read their chemistry and perform the first experiments to reveal temperature records from their shells.
They then applied the method to small barnacles collected from some of the debris recovered from MH370 to reconstruct temperature records of marine organisms.
By combining oceanographic modeling and temperature records, scientists have successfully generated a partial ocean drift pattern for the missing plane debris.
“Unfortunately, the largest and oldest barnacles are not yet available for study, but this study demonstrates that the method can be applied to barnacles that have settled on rubble immediately after a crash to reconstruct a complete drift path. “We even investigated the cause of the crash,” Dr. Herbert said.
Barnacles growing in a controlled environment as part of a growth experiment for research
(University of South Florida)
Searches for the missing flight have so far stretched thousands of miles along what is known as the “seventh arc” of the North-South Corridor, and investigators suspect the aircraft may have glided out of fuel.
Because ocean temperatures can change rapidly along the arc, the researchers believe the new method can pinpoint the position of planes.
Analysis of some of the barnacles that were attached to the recovered plane debris showed that the largest barnacle found among them had settled on the wreckage shortly after the crash and was “very close” to the actual crash site where the plane crashed. It turned out that there was a high possibility that it had settled nearby. You can find it now.
“If so, the temperatures recorded in those shells could help researchers narrow down their investigations,” Dr. Herbert said.
Even if the plane isn’t in this arc, studying the oldest and largest barnacles can narrow down the area to explore in the Indian Ocean.
“The plane disappeared more than nine years ago, and we all worked hard to put in place new approaches to help resume the search effort, which was suspended in January 2017. It could bring some end to the dozens of families on board the plane,” said Nassar Al-Qattan, one of the study’s authors.
“Knowing the tragic story behind the mystery motivated everyone involved in the project to get the data and publish the study,” he said.