Researchers Create Oceanic Tracking Model to Urge Investigators to Revive Search for Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight

An international team of researchers led by a UC Davis alum has created a new method to reconstruct the drift path and origin of debris from Malaysia Airlines flight 370, which went missing over the Indian Ocean with 239 passengers onboard.

University of South Florida Associate Professor of Geosciences Gregory Herbert, who received his doctoral degree from UC Davis in 2005, was inspired the moment he saw photographs of the plane debris that washed ashore on Reunion Island off the coast of Africa a year after the 2014 crash.

“The debris 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,” Herbert said.

As an evolutionary and conservation biologist, Herbert studies marine systems with a particular focus on shelled marine invertebrates, such as oysters, conchs and barnacles, tiny crustaceans known to stick to many types of surfaces. Over the last two decades, Herbert created and refined a method to extract ocean temperatures stored in their chemistry. He’s utilized this method to determine the ages and extinction risk of the giant horse conchs and investigate the environmental circumstances surrounding the disappearance of the Jamestown colony.

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 the temperature of the surrounding water at the time that the layer was formed. In this study, published in AGU Advances, Herbert led an international research team to conduct a growth experiment with live barnacles to read their chemistry and for the first time, unlocked temperature records from the shells of barnacles.

“The oxygen isotope analyses used by the Herbert research team is one of the primary tools used to reconstruct ocean temperatures from fossil and living organisms,” said Howard Spero, a study co-author and a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the UC Davis Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

After the experiment, they applied the successful method to small gooseneck barnacles (Lepas anatifera) from MH370. With help from barnacle experts and oceanographers at the University of Galway, they combined the barnacles’ water temperature records with oceanographic modeling and successfully generated a partial drift reconstruction.

“The new calibration and temperature reconstructions with the drift model provide a roadmap for doing a more extensive forensic study of the post-crash path of the wing drift,” Spero said. 

“French scientist Joseph Poupin, who was one of the first biologists to examine the debris, concluded that the largest barnacles attached were possibly old enough to have colonized on the wreckage very shortly after the crash and very close to the actual crash location where the plane is now,” Herbert said. “Sadly, they have not yet been made available for research, but with this study, we’ve proven this method can be applied to a barnacle that colonized on the debris shortly after the crash to reconstruct a complete drift path back to the crash origin.”

Up to this point, the search for MH370 has spanned 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. Because ocean temperatures can change rapidly along the arc, Herbert says this method could reveal precisely where the plane is located. 

Even if the plane is not on the arc, Herbert said studying the oldest and largest barnacles can still narrow down the areas to search in the Indian Ocean.

“We now have a lot more confidence of the temperatures that the gooseneck barnacles actually grew in,” Spero said. “The drift path was close, but two degrees Celsius in an ocean region where you have currents with different temperatures can shift the drift pattern by 50 to 100 miles.”  

“Knowing the tragic story behind the mystery motivated everyone involved in this project to get the data and have this work published,” said Nasser Al-Qattan, a recent USF geochemistry doctoral graduate who helped analyze the barnacles. “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.”

A version of this article originally appeared on the University of South Florida website. It has been adapted for the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis.