Barnacle Shells Could Help Solve Mystrey Of Missing MH370 Plane, Say Scientists

Scientists think that marine life may help locate the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which vanished in March 2014 and became one of the deadliest aviation catastrophes in the world. In the still unsolved aviation mystery, all 239 passengers were assumed dead and the full remains of the Boeing 777 remain unfound. The procedure, which is detailed in the journal AGU Advances, involves investigating the chemistry of barnacle shells to ascertain the environmental conditions, such as the temperature and ocean drift conditions, under which the marine animals grew, as per a report in Newsweek.

Photographs of the plane debris which were captured on Reunion Island off the coast of Africa a year after the disaster inspired scientists, notably Gregory Herbert from the University of South Florida, who started on the theory. "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," Mr Herbert, the co-author of the study, said in a statement.

Barnacles and other animals with shells develop new layers daily that resemble tree rings and the chemistry of each layer is influenced by the water temperature in the area at the time the layer was formed. A technique to obtain ocean temperatures from the chemistry of invertebrate shells has been developed and improved during the past 20 years. Researchers in this study experimented on living barnacles to evaluate their chemistry and release temperature data from their shells. To rebuild the water temperature records of the marine animals, they then used the technique on tiny barnacles that were retrieved from some of the MH370 debris.

The researchers were able to create a partial ocean drift pattern for the missing flight's component using oceanic modelling and temperature records.

"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 colonised on the debris shortly after the crash to reconstruct a complete drift path back to the crash origin," Dr Herbert said. They discovered that the largest barnacles on the retrieved flight fragment were probably old enough to have colonised on the debris "very shortly" after the crash and "very close" to the actual crash area where the plane could be located.

"If so, the temperatures recorded in those shells could help investigators narrow their search," he concluded.