Apart from a few pieces of debris that washed onto an Indian Ocean island, no trace has been found of the Malaysian Airlines flight that vanished in March 2014, but an innocuous marine limpet could provide clues to its whereabouts, as bizarre as it sounds.
Scientists believe they could have the answer to one of the ocean’s biggest mysteries and it lies in the shells of barnacles.
A team of researchers at the University of South Florida has found a method to extract ocean temperature records from the shells. How could this help, you might ask?
Using the record of water temperature, the team believes they will be able to reconstruct the drift path of the barnacles on the washed-up debris back to its point of origin.
The official hunt for the plane, traveling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, was called off in January 2017. A six-month private search a year later also failed to find any trace of the aircraft.
So far they have only partially reconstructed the path due to only having access to smaller shells on the wreckage but they believe if they can apply it to the larger ones that formed at the crash site they will find the plane.
University of South Florida geoscientist Associate Professor Gregory Herbert said he got the idea the moment he saw photographs of the plane debris that washed ashore on Reunion Island off the coast of Africa a year after the crash.
“The flaperon was covered in barnacles and as soon as I saw that, I immediately began sending emails to the search investigators because I knew the geochemistry of their shells could provide clues to the crash location,” said Professor Herbet.
An expert in shelled marine invertebrates, Herbert has spent two decades refining a way to extract ocean temperatures stored in shells.
Barnacles and other shelled marine invertebrates grow their shells daily, producing internal layers similar to tree rings. The chemistry of each layer is determined by the temperature of the surrounding water at the time the layer was formed.
Professor Herbert and his team did a growth experiment with live barnacles to read their chemistry, and for the first time unlocked temperature records from their shells.
According to the study, published in the journal AGU Advances, they applied the method to small barnacles from MH370 debris.
With help from barnacle experts and oceanographers at the National University of Ireland Galway, they combined the barnacles’ water temperature records with oceanographic modeling and successfully generated a partial drift reconstruction.
An example from the study here shows each piece of debris from the crash moving around the so-called “Seventh Arc.”
“Sadly, the largest and oldest barnacles have not yet been made available for research but with this study, we’ve proven this method can be applied to a barnacle that colonized on the debris shortly after the crash to reconstruct a complete drift path back to the crash origin,” said Dr. Herbert.
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The official search covered 120,000 square kilometers (46,000 sq miles) of ocean, including several thousands of miles along a north-south corridor deemed “The Seventh Arc,” where investigators believe the plane could have glided after running out of fuel.
Ocean temperatures can change rapidly along the arc, leading him to believe that his method could reveal precisely where the plane is.
“Even if the plane is not on the arc, studying the oldest and largest barnacles can still narrow down the areas to search in the Indian Ocean,” he adds.
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“The plane disappeared more than nine years ago, and we all worked aiming to introduce a new approach to help resume the search, suspended in January 2017, which might help bring some closure to the tens of families of those on the missing plane,” said Dr. Nassar Al-Qattan.
“Knowing the tragic story behind the mystery motivated everyone involved in this project to get the data and have this work published.”
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