BARNACLES found on a piece of plane debris could potentially provide crucial information about the fate of MH370, the Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared in 2014.
According to a study published in AGU Advances, the barnacles on a flaperon (a moving part of the wing) that washed up on Réunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean, suggest that MH370 may have drifted much further south than previously believed.
MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur on March 8, 2014, and was heading to Beijing. However, it lost contact with air traffic control less than an hour after take-off when it was over the South China Sea and has since remained missing. The 227 passengers and 12 crew members aboard are presumed dead.
Over the course of four years, extensive search efforts—including the use of submersible vehicles, drift modeling, and sonar imaging—were conducted to locate the aircraft. While the plane was never found, fragments of wreckage were discovered across the Indian Ocean.
By studying the formation of barnacle shells, researchers have been able to determine the surface temperatures of the ocean where the barnacles grew. This information is valuable in the ongoing search for MH370.
“The flaperon was covered in barnacles, and upon observing this, I immediately began notifying the search investigators because I knew that the geochemistry of the barnacle shells could offer insights into the crash location,” explained Gregory Herbert, a co-author of the study and associate professor at the University of South Florida.
“Regrettably, the largest and oldest barnacles haven’t been made available for research. Nevertheless, this study demonstrates the feasibility of using barnacles that colonized the debris soon after the crash to reconstruct the complete drift path back to the crash origin.”
In 2017, government-led search operations for the plane were terminated. However, in 2018, Ocean Infinity, a private company, conducted a second search, which was subsequently suspended after yielding no results.
Last year, Ocean Infinity expressed its intention to resume the search in 2023 or 2024, pending approval from the Malaysian government. – Bloomberg
Credit: The Star : News Feed
