Show Notes
This week mark the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the first piece of physical evidence in the case of the missing Malaysian Airliner, MH370. When the badly damaged right flaperon washed ashore on La Réunion, a French island in the western Indian Ocean, on July 17, 2015, it immediately caused a worldwide sensation. Scientists realized that the barnacles found growing on the flaperon could provide important clues as to where it had drifted from — and that, presumably, would at last reveal the plane’s crash site. At a time when the seabed search had proven frustratingly empty, they hoped that this information could provide the key to finally solving the case. But scientists were missing an important piece of context: a robust understanding of how exactly Lepas anatifera barnacles grow when floating in the open ocean. For years, that understanding proved elusive. However, using data from the Atlantic Oceonographic & Meteorological Laboratory in Miami and the assistance of volunteers living by the ocean’s edge, I’ve finally been able to collect specimens of known age that put the growth of the flaperon barnacles in context and reveal when the object went into the water. It turns out that scientists’ initial expectations were way off the mark. Get full access to Finding MH370 at www.deepdivemh370.com/subscribe
More from Finding MH370
A newly recovered drifter buoy from Mauritius shows for the first time how barnacles like the ones found on MH370's flaperon grow during more than two years at sea. The new data suggests a new methodology for determining how long the debris floated in the sea -- and whether it's plausible that the plane really did crash land in the remote ocean.
The ocean is vast -- but the range of possible places that MH370 could be is limited, constrained by evidence and the plane's performance. Today's experiment lets us define that area, and thereby determine just how much effort it would take to solve the case once and for all.
The ocean is huge, but the range of places that MH370 could be is tightly constrained, and recent searches have made it even smaller. Today we discuss where the noose has tightened down to, and where Ocean Infinity will look.
If you want to find an airliner on the seabed, you could do worse than to talk to someone who's already done. I interview underwater search expert Tony Romeo about how he used a high-tech submersible to locate a long-missing Pan Am airliner in the sea off Puerto Rico, and why he thinks he can do the same for MH370.
A Pan Am airliner lay on the seabed near Puerto Rico for more than 70 years until Russ Matthews and his team located it. He tells us how they did it.