Sea Barnacles Could Hold The Key To Finding Missing Malaysia Arlines Flight

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared in 2014 nearly ten years ago today, and it remains one of the biggest mysteries of commercial aviation. Millions of dollars have been sunk into locating the wreckage of the MH370, but search efforts have been futile. Investigators now believe that Gooseneck barnacles growing on the recovered bits of debris from the MH370 could trace a path to the plane’s crash site ending the decade-long search, as Intelligencer reports.

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The pieces of debris in question washed ashore on Reunion Island in 2015, about 16 months after the plane’s disappearance. The flaperon that French authorities recovered was overrun by Lepas anatifera, or Gooseneck barnacles, which happen to contain a record of their growth on the seafaring journey that they’ve taken since attaching themselves to the plane’s right wing flaperon:

Better still, the flaperon carried with it evidence that may help locate the plane and solve the mystery once and for all: a population of gooseneck barnacles called Lepas anatifera. Like the rings of a tree, their shells contain a record of their life. Decode that information and it may be possible to trace their path on the flaperon backward to the impact site and the mystery would be solved. “We stumbled upon something that gave much more certainty about the whereabouts of the plane than we anticipated,” says David Griffin, who led a team of Australian government scientists tasked with solving the case.

If scientists and investigators can decipher the information in the “tree rings” of the barnacles, they can uncover information to renew the search, which Malaysia abandoned after scouring the southern Indian Ocean but failing to find any major clues — let alone, the missing plane. The country has said it will not retake the search unless new and compelling information is found.

Photo: Tuwaedaniya Meringing/AFP (Getty Images)

That new information is plentiful given the barnacle specimens found on the MH370’s debris, and scientists can model new studies on prior research that relied on barnacles to trace drift patterns while studying endangered sea turtles. Per Intelligencer:

Scientists can tell the oldest and newest barnacles apart by measuring their size, which correlates with the length of time the animal has been growing on an object. This can be combined with “drift modeling,” which uses historical data about the drift paths of research buoys to create probabilistic estimates of a floating object’s origins. Martin Stelfox, founder of the Olive Ridley Project, a sea-turtle conservation program, has used Lepas barnacles to figure out where wildlife-ensnaring fishing gear has drifted from. “It’s a fairly reliable way to give you an idea of how long that gear has been drifting,” he says. “We can then use that age estimate to plug into things like drifting current models and start to backtrack to where potentially this gear may have come from.”

The barnacles have, indeed, provided new information but it hasn’t been as clear as investigators hoped it would be. Scientists were eager to study drift paths that the barnacles would uncover based on their size, but it turns out the barnacles have variable growth patterns. The rate at which the barnacles grow isn’t uniform, and is not dependent on biological age alone.

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Barnacle growth also takes into account the temperature of surrounding waters and the food sources available to the growing crustaceans:

What researchers didn’t know back in 2015 was what a six-, 12-, or 18-month-old barnacle in the subtropical Indian Ocean would look like. In the years following the flaperon’s discovery, researchers tried growing barnacles in the lab and on buoys at sea and found that Lepas grows at different rates and winds up at different sizes depending on the temperature of the water and how much there is to eat.

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It isn’t just the size of the shell that tells a story but also its chemical composition, which varies depending on the temperature of the water the Lepas is floating in when it lays down a given layer. This technique has been applied to the flaperon’s barnacles several times over the past decade. In the most recent study, published last year, a team led by Kuwait University researcher Nasser Al-Qattan analyzed a barnacle shell provided by the French authorities. The shell was relatively small, about 25 millimeters, which meant it was “only several months in age,” according to the study. Its chemistry indicated the creature had started growing in relatively warm water of 80 degrees before drifting into cooler water of around 75 degrees. “Its recorded drift reveals that the MH370 flaperon likely spent its last several months west of longitude 70°E and within 1,500 km of Réunion Island,” the researchers concluded. That’s over 1,000 miles from the MH370 search zone.

To further complicate the investigation, the barnacles also grew in a pattern that scientists can’t explain, having sprouted in a seemingly impossible location on the recovered debris. From the report:

When French scientists took the flaperon from Réunion to a test facility in Toulouse, they put it in a tank to see how it floated. They found the slab-shaped flaperon floated at an angle, with one of its long edges sticking up high out of the water, where it’s physically impossible for Lepas to grow. Yet this edge was thickly settled with a healthy Lepas population. The apparent contradiction baffled the first French scientist who studied it and remains unexplained to this day. The edge had to be underwater, says Williams College invertebrate biologist Jim Carlton, “because it has Lepas on it. Lepas don’t lie.”

The barnacles have provided both promising clues and baffling new mysteries to the MH370’s whereabouts. The only thing that’s certain, as Intelligencer claims, is that investigators need to revisit the underlying assumptions that have informed the search thus far, because 10 years and 93,000 square miles of scoured seabed later, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is still missing.