Sea creatures could lead investigators to the wreck of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, scientists say.
Apart from a few pieces of debris washed onto an Indian Ocean island, no trace has been found of the plane that vanished with 12 crew and 227 passengers in March 2014.
The official hunt for the plane, travelling 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.
But now 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 have found a method to extract ocean temperature records from the shells.
Using this they can reconstruct the drift path of barnacles on the debris back to the origin.
So far they have only partially reconstructed it 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.
He said: “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.”
An expert in shelled marine invertebrates, Prof 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 temperature of the surrounding water at the time the layer was formed.
Prof 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.
Prof Herbert said: “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.”
The official search covered 120,000 square kilometres (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.
Prof Herbert says that because ocean temperatures can change rapidly along the arc, his method could reveal precisely where the plane is.
He added: ‘French scientist Joseph Poupin, who was one of the first biologists to examine the flaperon, concluded that the largest barnacles attached were possibly old enough to have colonised on the wreckage very shortly after the crash and very close to the actual crash location where the plane is now.
‘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.’
One of the team, Dr Nassar Al-Qattan said: ‘Knowing the tragic story behind the mystery motivated everyone involved in this project to get the data and have this work published.
‘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.’
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