Description

Debris which floats across oceans collects a wide variety of marine organisms as it travels, allowing scientists to understand how long it has been in the water and where it has traveled from, as I’ve written about previously. Aircraft wreckage which entered the water in the eastern part of the Indian Ocean as a result of a crash on March 8, 2014 should for the most part be richly covered in a variety of organisms. However, this was not observed; most of the pieces had little or no visible biofouling.

A notable exception was the flaperon which washed ashore on Réunion Island in July, 2015, which had a rich covering of marine biofouling. However, the age of the barnacles did not match the length of time the piece was supposed to have been in the water. According to the final report issued by the ATSB, “The Operational Search for MH370 (https://apo.org.au/node/112656),” on October 3, 2017: “the specimens analysed here were quite young, perhaps less than one month.”

Local Mozambique officials who were able to examine the Gibson piece firsthand were similarly skeptical. Joao de Abreu, the director of Mozambique’s National Civil Aviation Institute, was quoted by his government’s official news agency as saying that the object was too clean to have been in the ocean for two years.

Jim Carlton, Professor of Marine Sciences Emeritus at Williams College, agrees that the condition of the Mozambique debris is puzzling. “Without any bioforensic evidence,” he says, “it’s just a headscratcher.”

The absence of biofouling on a piece of suspected aircraft debris recovered in Mozambique in December, 2015 suggests that it entered the water no earlier than October of that year. The absence of biofouling on a piece of suspected aircraft debris recovered in Mozambique in February, 2016 suggests that it entered the water no earlier than January, 2016. It is entirely possible that one or both of the Mozambique objects were never in the ocean at all.

All of these results counterindicate a scenario in which these pieces of debris were generated by a crash on March 8, 2014 near the area searched by the ATSB. It is incumbent on all the relevant authorities to make public the details of a close examination of the parts, in order to determine how these objects could have arrived in the western Indian Ocean.

Sources: Article 1 (https://www.jeffwise.net/2018/02/08/mh370-debris-fouling-supports-spo…), Article 2 (https://www.sqr.ohw.mybluehost.me/2016/03/17/bioforensic-analysis-of-…)