Goose barnacles of the genus Lepas live exclusively on debris floating in the open ocean. Like other barnacles, their larvae spend the early part of their life swimming freely and then, in a final larval phase called the cyprid stage, search out a floating object on which to settle. Once they find a suitable object, says marine biologist Hank Carson, “cyprids in general do do a fair bit of exploration for that cementation spot” upon it, and with good reason: they’ll spend the rest of their life there. Among the criteria they assess is how crowded a spot is, what the underlying substrate consists of, and how deep it is. Once satisfied, they glue their heads in place.
In general Lepas barnacles like to spread out, and prefer a spot in the shade; they grow best away from the top of the water column. The reason is that close to the waterline, the rising and falling of waves periodically exposes the animals to the air, which interferes with their feeding. It’s unhealthy for them in other ways, too. “The uppermost centimeters of water are normally a quite harsh environment with strongly changing ecological parameters, like water temperature, salinity (heavy rains or intense evaporation in tropical areas). Moreover they are subjected to intensive UV radiation,” says Hans-Georg Herbig of the Institut für Geologie und Mineralogie in Cologne, Germany. “From several organism groups it is known that they avoid the uppermost centimeters of the water column.”
Given a healthful environment, Lepas barnacles are notoriously fast-growing. The animals evolved to live on floating organic debris which after a time will break apart and sink, so time is of the essence. Whereas a species of goose barnacle that lives attached to a rock might take five years to reach sexual maturity,1 Lepas can do it in mere weeks. Japanese researcher Yoichi Yusa and his colleagues raised L. anserifera barnacles on tethered debris in a bay in Japan and found that “individuals on the average grew from 3 mm to more than 12 mm in capitulum length within 15 days and some were brooding.” Thus, in less than a month after settling onto a piece of debris, Lepas can begin producing new generations to further their colonization.2
As a result Lepas-settled flotsam can become extremely crowded in short order, with individuals crammed onto every available surface right up to the uppermost limit of what they can survive. Pictured above in Figure 1 is a Japanese skiff that was swept to sea after the Tohoku tsunami in March, 2011, and made landfall on a beach in Washington state in June of the following year, meaning that it floated capsized for about 15 months. If you think it’s remarkable that the barnacles could have grown so huge in so little time, think again. “They grow really fast,” says Cynthia Venn, a professor of oceanography and geology at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania. “That boat could get covered like that in six months, even.”
Venn has studied the genus Lepas intensively for more than twenty years. For ten of them, she collected specimens from NOAA’s Tropical Ocean and Atmosphere array of research buoys dotted across the central Pacific Ocean, carefully preserving material that the maintenance crews considered pesky marine fouling. “It was basically a 3-D time series of barnacle settlement,” she says. “I couldn’t find anyone to take the project so I just did it myself. I was able to go two cruises, for the rest I sent my studentsand they then shipped the barnacles back to me so I could work on them. I’ve got hundreds of thousands of barnacles in my garage.”
Looking at the skiff more closely, we see that the upper part of the hull is ringed with a very well-defined boundary below which the Lepas are cheek-by-jowl (orange line in Fig. 2, below). Above that lies an intermediary zone, extending to the waterline (green line), where algae predominate. While some barnacles are visible, they are small and few in number. “They get a better shot at what they’re going to eat if they’re a little bit below that,” says Venn. “I don’t know if it’s too much UV or just they don’t like the temperature changes, or what.”
A Lepas line is also easily seen in the picture below (Figure 3), which shows meteorological research buoys before (“a”) and after (“b”) a 26-month deployment in the North Pacific. “The waterline is at the center (max diameter) of the buoy, where there is a seam in the hull,” says Jim Thomson, a scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who studies the buoys.3 “The barnacles appear to start about 10 cm below that line.”
Here’s another piece of tsunami debris, this one a refrigerator that made landfall in Hawaii in October, 2012, meaning that it was in the water for just over a year and a half. Both the Lepas line and the algae zone are clearly visible. The waterline, Venn says, would lie about where the green algae shades into black:
You may have noticed that while the hard part, called the capitulum, is of similar sizes in all these pictures, the fleshy, goose-neck part (called the peduncle) is dramatically smaller on the Hawaii debris. Like other fleshy appendages, peduncles can change in size fairly dramatically, especially when they’ve been pulled from the sea. “How long they are kind of depends on how long they’ve had to dry out,” says Venn. So when scientists talk about the growth rate of barnacles, they usually talk about the length of the capitulum.
How Composite Objects Float
According to reader Gavin Grimmer, The upper and lower surfaces of 777 flaperon are “made of honeycombed composite – presumably carbon fiber” while “the leading edge is mainly made from high tensile aluminum (2024-T3) apart from the fibreglass doubler.”4 As a general rule, things made of composite material exhibit excellent buoyancy. The honeycomb materials which makes up most of the volume of the composite skin weighs only about 5 percent as much as water.5 Composite aircraft parts, therefore, tend to float fairly high in the water, like this:
Mike Exner, one of the leading members of the Independent Group, conducted his own study of how the flaperon must have floated, building a model out of plastic poster board. After the interior compartment was flooded it settled into the water like this:
Another example of a composite floating object is this motor boat, which capsized in a storm off the northwestern coast of Australia and then was carried for eight months by waves and currents across the Indian Ocean to the island of Mayotte, near Madagascar — a very similar route that the MH370 presumably took on its journey from the 7th arc. Though the resolution is too low to discern the Lepas line from the algae zone, you can clearly see which part was above the water and which part was below:
Now let’s turn our attention to the 777 flaperon that washed up on a rocky beach on Reunion Island. More than two months later, the French authorities still haven’t released a report detailing what they’ve learned about the piece, which now resides at a facility near Toulouse. Fortunately journalists took photographs of the flaperon from every angle shortly after it was discovered so that just by gathering publicly available images from the web we can assess the whole surface.
As a general observation, we should note that the general shape of the flaperon is plank-like: rectangular when seen from above, with an airfoil cross section. In referring to the part, I will use the nomenclature shown in Fig. 8, below.
Note that the geometry of the piece is essentially planar, by which I mean that the faces do not bulge outwards. As a result, if one point on the edge of an end-cap is underwater, and the corresponding point on the edge of the far end-cap is under water, then the surface between them will be immersed, too. (You can get a sense of this “flatness” in Figures 10 and 14, below.)
To begin with, let’s look at the outboard end cap. Barnacles, either individual or in clumps, are circled in green. I have not necessarily circled all of them, but at least those necessary to show the range of distribution. (To see the full-resolution version of this and all subsequent images, click on the link in the caption.)
Given that the end-cap is rimmed in barnacles, it must have all floated below the waterline. One could argue that a small portion of the strip marked with the red line could emerge from the water, but to my eye it lies between the outer edges of the barnacle clusters marked “A” and “B,” which would not grow up out of the water.
Moving on to the leading edge, we see in Figure 10 (below) that there is a substantial accumulation of barnacles on the outboard end of it, as well as some growth on the inboard side. Though there is little or no growth between these areas, that portion must have been submerged by virtue of lying between those two submerged areas:
This view offers more detail of the inboard end of the leading edge. Growth is quite heavy, though only the tips of barnacle clusters extend outward beyond the plane of the leading edge:
It’s fairly self-evident that the top surface was immersed:
As well as the trailing edge, where the flaperon was evidently severed along the line of a transverse spar. Here we see the top edge, along with some of the bottom:
Here’s the rest of the bottom part of the trailing edge:
Now let’s look at the inboard end cap.
Onward to the object’s final face, the bottom surface. It does not exhibit the same degree of encrustation as we see on the top side. In Figure 16, below, we see the underside of the flaperon with the trailing edge at top. We’ve already noted the presence of barnacles on the bottom of the trailing edge and the bottom of the inboard end cap. We haven’t seen as much yet of the bottom of the outboard end cap, so I’ll focus on that area in this image:
Barnacle growth is much less profuse on the bottom than it is on the trailing edge, but there are enough individuals present on this portion to suggest that the entire bottom edge of the outboard end cap must have been submerged. So, therefore, must have the entire underside. Note that the numbers “1,” “2,” and “3” correspond to the clusters of barnacles marked likewise in Figure 9.
How did the Reunion flaperon float?
The contrast between the Reunion flaperon and other floating debris we’ve looked at is quiet stark. The piece that came off MH370 does not have a Lepas line. There is no significant area that could have protruded above the waterline. The entire surface resembles the deeply submerged areas seen on the other flotsam.
This fact evidently did not escape the French investigators who took custody of the piece. On August 21, the French news outlet La Depeche reported in August that “According to a Toulouse aeronautics expert who requested anonymity, the element of the wing would not have floated for several months at the water’s surface but would have drifted underwater a few meters deep.” Similarly, an article that ran in Le Monde on September 3, 2015, stated that “Les études de flottabilité du flaperon ont quant à elles confirmé que le débris flottait légèrement en dessous de la surface de la mer.”: “Studies of the flaperon’s flotation have… confirmed that the debris floated slightly below the surface of the ocean.”
This seems a reasonable assessment to Venn, based on the distribution of barnacles visible in photographs of the flaperon. “I think it was probably floating just barely subsurface,” she says.
This presents something of a paradox. “It is very hard to build something that will float slightly below the surface,” wrote David Griffin, an oceanographer with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), in an email. “The probability that an aircraft part does this is miniscule. The only way it can do this is if some of the object breaks the surface. If it does not break the surface AT ALL it must sink.”
One could just about imagine that, by sheer good luck, the flaperon might have wound up taking just enough water to give it an overall density almost exactly that of seawater, so that it floated with perhaps a minuscule portion above the water. But such a situation would not be stable. Objects floating with only very slightly positive buoyancy can be pushed below the surface by the action of large waves, says Sean Kery, a hydronamicist at CSC Defense Group who has extensive experience modeling the impact of waves on floating objects. If storm waves push down an object being held afloat by open air pockets, the increase in depth would cause those pockets to shrink, reducing their buoyancy and causing the object to sink further, a phenomenon well-known by recreational scuba divers, who must learn to keep inflating their BCDs as they descend. Of course, without an active compensation system like a BCD a flaperon that was neutrally buoyant at the surface would become negatively buoyant below it.
What’s more, even if an object did manage to float just barely touching the surface, it would eventually sink lower as marine life accumulated. “Things never stay statically neutral,” says oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer. “It’s a dynamic situation. It has to do with infiltration of water, it has to do with the weight of barnacles growing on it.”
Thus, the distribution of barnacles on the Reunion flaperon is difficult to understand. Because they are found all over its surface, the flaperon must have settled into the ocean with a buoyancy exactly identical to that of seawater. And somehow it remained there, floating in a stable manner. Yet this is close to physically impossible.
How could the flaperon have remained underwater?
Given the seeming impossibility of the flaperon floating free across the ocean while submerged, is there another way it might have arrived in its current barnacle-encrusted condition? Since the piece must have been completely underwater, it might have become colonized on the sea bottom. That explanation, however, is problematic. The 7th arc passes through an area of the southern Indian Ocean that is thousands of feet deep. In order to have become colonized by Lepas on the seabed, it would have had to have floated thousands of miles to shallower water, sunk, then refloated to the surface and almost immediately been washed ashore. Also, while Venn says that while she has collected specimens from as deep as 100 meters, “that was not on the bottom or anywhere close to the bottom. It was simply 100 meters below the surface where the ocean was probably more than 5000 meters deep. I have never heard of Lepas colonizing anything on the sea bottom.”
Another possibility is that the flaperon was positively bouyant but remained beneath the ocean surface because it was tethered to the seabed. As it happens, in the past researchers have successfully managed to raise Lepas on substrates anchored offshore. In Yoichi Yusa’s experiment noted above, he collected Lepas specimens growing on pieces of driftwood and floating plastic and attached them to tethers in a bay in Japan. There he monitored their progress as they grew over the next month and a half.
The view of the flaperon seen in Figure 17, below, might provide evidence of how the tethering was accomplished. On the inboard edge of the upper face one can observe a peculiar strip where the surface appears considerably less weathered than the surrounding area:
When this was first pointed out to me I figured it had to do with the missing piece of rubber gasket along the inboard edge of the top surface, which might have been knocked off by contact with a reef. But now that I look closer I see that it isn’t actually that. I’ve marked the “white area” on a photo of a new flaperon below (image reversed to make a left flaperon look like a right one):
It seems that something was clamped to the “lighter patch” that isn’t normally attached to a flaperon, and which was detached after the part spent some time in the ocean. Since it’s hard to imagine this happening without human agency, perhaps it was part of a tethering/untethering operation. Perhaps an anchor line was attached there.
Duration of immersion
Up until now, it has been assumed that the flaperon was deposited somewhere along the 7th arc soon when MH370 impacted the southern Indian Ocean on March 8, 2014. If it was actively tethered to the seabed, obviously, this timeline is no longer relevant. Instead, we can turn to the barnacles to provide some indication of the likely duration of the flaperon’s immersion.
“Assuming they have enough food, and the temperature is good, barnacles will follow a steady growth progression,” Venn says.
The clock starts running the moment the flaperon hits the water: So long as the water is warm enough, Lepas will begin to colonize an object almost immediately. (Yachtsman who make long oceanic passages report that after spending a few weeks heeled over on a single tack a section of hull that is normally high and dry can pick up a colony of Lepas; Venn says she has seen cyprids attach to material as ephemeral as floating paper bags.) While the precise growth rate depends on water temperature and food availability, a rough notion of these parameters is enough to yield a ball-park figure for how long immersion has continued. Earlier this year, Venn co-authored a paper in which she and her colleagues ascertained that a human body found floating off the cost of Italy must have been in the water at least 65 to 90 days, based on the size of the Lepas barnacles growing on its clothes.6
We can do something similar for the barnacles on the flaperon, using the Mayotte boat as a reference. Since both traveled through a similar stretch of the southern Indian Ocean, their growth rates should be in the same ball park.
By comparing features on the flaperon to reference objects of a known size (e.g., the rear door of a Gendarmerie Land Rover Defender in Figure 16) we can estimate the capitulum lengths of the largest barnicles on the flaperon. They turn out to be approximately 2.3 cm.
Applying the same technique to the Mayotte barnacles yields capitulum lengths of about 3.5 cm.
Yusa’s paper on Lepas growth rates states that “Individuals <5 mm long (mean ± SE = 3.09 ± 0.19 mm) grew rapidly, reaching 12.45 ± 0.54 mm on day 15 (Fig. 2). After that, their growth slowed and finally reached 16.26 ± 0.49 mm on day 42.”
The Lepas anserifera that Yusa studied are somewhat smaller than the Lepas anatifera that predominate on the flaperon, but if we use Yusa’s growth rate as a conservative lower bound, and suppose that the largest flaperon barnacles were 16.3 mm at day 42 and grew at 0.1 mm/day thereafter, that means it would take them another 67 days to reach 2.3 cm, for a total growth time of 109 days, or about four months.
If they proceeded to grow at 0.1 mm for the following four months, that would take them to 3.5 cm, which is what the Mayotte barnacles achieved.
Interestingly, when I asked Yusa via email how long it seemed to him that the colony had been growing on the Reunion Island flaperon, based on photographs I sent, Yusa answered: “I would guess that they had been there for a short time (between 2 weeks and a few months).”
Venn’s seat-of-the-pants estimate was “less than six months.”
Conclusion
Photographs of barnacles living on the MH370 flaperon discovered on Reunion Island, combined with expert insight into the lifecycle and habit preferences of the genus Lepas, suggest that the object did not float there from the plane’s presumed impact point, but spent approximately four months tethered below the surface.
UPDATE 10/10/15: Could the distribution of barnacles be explained by continual flipping?
Since I posted this piece yesterday evening, a number of people have suggested that perhaps the flaperon flipped over every few hours, allowing barnacles to survive on both sides. Such a scenario might also explain why the density of Lepas is rather low compared to that seen on other objects. It faces two difficulties, however.
First, the flaperon is broad and flat, and once its inner cavities were filled with water it would weigh thousands of pounds. With only a few inches of freeboard in even the most optimistic scenarios, it would be very resistant to being flipped — much more so than, say, the fridge, which nonetheless clearly floated in a stable manner. Even if it were fairly easy to invert, high waves and wind would be required to do so, which would mean that flaperon would have had to have spent a year or more in constant storm conditions. Yet tranquil conditions are actually more normal. “Calm seas are actually pretty common in the stable high pressure cells that more-or-less permanently inhabit the center of ocean basins,” says Hank Carson, who has traveled across the Pacific gathering floating debris. It’s hard to envisage anyhing flipping over a day like this.
Second, the reason that the Lepas line exists is that these animals don’t like to be exposed, even for a few seconds. They can survive close to the waterline, where they are risk being exposed and immersed with every wave cycle, but only a few small outliers attempt it. They are simply not adapted to frequent long-duration exposure, like their relatives who live attached to rocks in the intertidal zone. “I do not think they can survive more than one day above the water,” Yoichi Yusa told me, while Venn says she has seen them live as long as three days. Apart from the physiological stress of being exposed to what to them is a toxic environment, the animals would spend half their time unable to feed. So even if we imagine the essentially impossible scenario in which the flaperon keeps flipping back and forth every few hours, we would not expect to see dense aggregations of mature individuals.
The implications of low settlement density
While we can learn a lot about how long an object has been afloat by the length of Lepas capitula, it’s harder to draw conclusions based on the density with which they settle. Barnacles do not land randomly, like plant seeds, but actively sniff out an object’s surface in the cyprid stage before settling down in the spot they like best. While they prefer living in the shade, they even more prefer cracks and crevices, and dislike a smooth surface. You can see several places on the top of the flaperon where they’ve preferentially settled down into dings and divots. Most of the broad expanse of the upper and lower surfaces they have avoided, most likely because it’s just too smooth and exposed. They especially seem to like the exposed broken honeycomb on the trailing edge, which presumably offers a nice rough surface for holding fast to. Here they are living in quite high density, with some actually growing on top of one another:
By way of comparison, here’s a shot of the barnacles on the Mayotte motorboat. Their distribution is much more uniform on every surface — here Lepas seem to like everything equally well:
Therefore, I wouldn’t necessarily say that Lepas density on the flaperon is low, but rather that the suitability of the substrate is very heterogeneous.
Dr. Griffiths said the flaperon barnacles were “Lepas anserifera striata.” Perhaps there are subtle life cycle differences between these and those in the various studies? For example, “Lepas anatifera” can tolerate colder water but just cannot reproduce if the water is too cold.
Didn’t Johnny Begue say that when he first found it he used the flaperon as a table? Perhaps he washed off some of the algae and even some of the barnacles first and that could explain some of the perceived color differences.
@Gysbreght – Now that you have divulged that you used some Cabernet Sauvignon as coloring, the French will never release their findings to us. Sacre Coeur!
Great investigative piece, Jeff!
Funny how within a day or two of this article being published, the Malaysians receive a mysterious “phone call” from someone’s “nephew” claiming Auntie had come across wreckage in the Mindanao jungle (in the Philippines) while out bird-spotting.
Auntie supposedly climbed into the wreckage which contained “lots of bodies, the pilot still strapped to his seat, and a Malaysian flag measuring 70 inches long and 35 inches wide.”
Locals of course rubbishing the claims and no trace of Auntie ever found…
Reminds me of that barnacled US drone debris washing ashore in the Maldives. Day or two later, some pilot “spots something white floating near Reunion” and no-one even notices the Maldives story!
@Trip – how strange you mention the evil barnacles, exactly the same thought popped into my mind!
Yes, there is a third vertical seen briefly at 8:20 in the video when flaps move to the landing position. It is a secondary small bracket that isn’t yet installed on the pristine flaperon. It has been discussed earlier and would be bolted over the black rectangle (there’s another one above it). Part of that bracket is indeed still present on the wreckage part.
@ Gysbreght – Got it. Thanks. I must have missed the earlier explanation somehow.
So, would not whatever was attached to the clean patch have caught on the edge of the wing when the flaperon was fully up?
The take-away for me is that the barnacle expertise tends to support that bit of leaked info from early on that confused everyone – the flaperon did not get much air time somehow. Consider also that during it’s time in the warmer IO you can go days without seeing a whitecap let alone a breaking wave to tip it over. Overall I agree with the view that it’s in remarkably good shape for a 16 month odyssey. The main point of degradation would be the detached ID tag???
@Matty,
If the ID tag was an on route degradation, we should see a cleanish patch, which we don’t. Must have been off before it hit the water.
Matty said: “The main point of degradation would be the detached ID tag???”
The gentleman who posted this refurbed flaperon pic on a.netters (TxSpotter, post 138, part 1: flaperon found)also claimed it was quite common to see flaperons come in for rebuild with the ID tag detached.
“NOTE: The part number/ serial numbers ARE NOT ETCHED/STAMPED on the control surfaces. There is a DATA PLATE which is sometimes riveted, but often times, pressed on. This occurs after the unit has gone to a shop that updates the part number after adding an Service Bulletin and the shop simply “glues” the new data plate on.
It is very common for these data plates to fall ”
I think too much emphasis is being placed on a missing data plate if the above is correct.
On another note, I was eyeing off 9M-MRN @ Ngurah Rai International on Sunday. Sister ship to MRO. It was a solemn moment thinking of that big bird hitting the drink. lest we forget.
Sharkcaver – I thought???? that once a flaperon is separated from the plane for rebuild the ID tag was removed as normal procedure? It is then in a pool of bits and no longer the property of a plane until re-designated. In some instances maybe they are not? Someone reading this will know I guess.
Matty, The ID tag may get replaced with another after a maintenance schedule was performed however SOP and traceability would dictate that it wouldn’t just be removed and placed in a parts bin full of others, awaiting a new one to be fitted.
My point above was that according to TxSpotter, “It is very common for these data plates to fall” off I guess is the word he left out.
If what is stated is true and correct, of which I have no inclination to disbelieve, it discounts conspiracy to some degree and makes the thought that it fell off on its lonely voyage believable. That is if it was even attached before flight.
@Sharkcaver
“If what is stated is true and correct, of which I have no inclination to disbelieve, it discounts conspiracy to some degree and makes the thought that it fell off on its lonely voyage believable. That is if it was even attached before flight.”
Would we have to expect, that the place where the data plate once was glued on and later in its live time fell off would do so without leaving any trace?
The spot would have been sanded before glueing the plate on. The glue would have a high quality suitable to stick on painted parts or the plate would be attached prior painting. The spot missed the exposure to the environments, exhaust gases and aircraft fluids for the time the plate was on.
I would expect some difference in color and some residue of glue on that spot. But this flaperon looks loke there has never been a plate attached.
http://www.allmystery.de/i/t08325a_1438202158gs8cUN.jpg
off-topic here now, but regarding to MH-17 case, manufacturer Almaz-Antey presented again (originaly in June 2015 – attached video) his matemathical modelling and ground experiments of his BUK M1 detonation near cockpit of plane; without any point to suspect yet, its interesting to help re-analyze by professionals here what they presented and compare it with upcoming Dutch results; as I understood, they even offered another experiment, to buy old 777 and down it flying on AP over military area to recreate conditions of tragic incident at Ukraine; my personal view is that they are experts in what they are doing, the same as another advanced in the world, usually in US, so I have no problem to trust them; its about math and experiments, loved here too; fact is, that all weapons are crazy things, the same as all wars…
sorry, here is the June 2015 video, current one not published yet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsohFzbJ-vs
Focus of Investigation
After this analysis of the flaperon “float modelling” raises doubt and suspicion into its origin, i think it would be wise now, not to jump to conclusions, but seek further corroboration of the suspicion by digging into the other amazing events of that night Mar 8th 2014:
– The misleading information to Vietnamese ATC by MAS HQ should be revisited therefore. It should be analyzed, which actions did happen compared to the actions that should have happened acording to senior members of the pilots community. A special focus should be directed once more at the misleading information , that the plane was over cambodia. Because if the misinformation was deliberate, it aims at expanding confusion, because it would take the responsibility from HCM ATC to a cambodian ATC. So the Vietnamese would not look on their primary radar, to find the plane, because this would have been in cambodian FIR.
– it should be revisited what a nefarious perpetrator would gain from the delay of due declaration of an emergency by HCM ATC AND MAS HQ. What is the routine for scrambling jets at Butterworth in case of an unknown intruder. Giving the malaysian radar observation is the best of asia?
– Why would it be necessary to move the plane beyond performance limits thru FIR borders of Thailand/Malaysia
– Why is the Sat logon nearly exactly at the time, where primary radar looses contact to the plane.
@Andrew, In some of the high-res images you can see barnacles that have just fallen off and are lying in the grass. Also, it looks to me like the extreme left end of the bottom trailing edge might have broken off quite recently, perhaps while coming ashore; the honeycomb looks freshly exposed.
I don’t think this was intentional but based on photographs available online of the gendarmes picking up the flaperon and putting it in the back of a Land Rover, it doesn’t look like they were treating it with great care; they didn’t wrap it before moving, for instance.
@Cosmic Academy, I agree and I’m working on that first one now.
Jeff, that was a highly intriguing read. In regard to this idea of the flaperon being somehow tethered underwater, can we dismiss the idea that it might have become entangled with discarded fishing nets or other sea-borne garbage and so kept below the surface? I am ignoring the potential anchor point you mentioned, for the moment.
@PhilD, Thanks! I don’t think we could rule out a fishing-net-entanglement scenario. It seems pretty unlikely, though–hard to imagine how the flaperon would wind up underwater in a fishing net, because this inert net would have to have one end entangled on the bottom, catch the positively-buoyant flaperon, and somehow drag it underwater.
BTW, I don’t want to place too much signifcance on the “mysteriously clean” strip, I don’t think it’s proof that the flaperon was tethered or even was necessarily the tethering point if it was; but it’s worth noting.
Whether in a fishing net, tethered by any means, or simply drifting near-fully submerged, the key point of Jeff’s article suggests that marine biologists – applying their expertise to the available photographic evidence – are saying there was nothing for the wind to catch.
Now go look at how close CSIRO’s “0% of wind” results are to Réunion after 16.7 months. If the large gap doesn’t give you pause, I don’t know what will.
Some argue the inherent imprecision of using models to predict chaotic systems. This argument is entirely valid, and would be very important if the goal was to narrow down the search zone to a few square kilometres.
But this argument flips over (like a waterlogged flaperon…) when the question is: “is drifting from the search zone to Réunion FEASIBLE?” In this context, the non-linearity of the model – and the resulting wide dispersion of its results – would tend to produce false POSITIVES (“sure, it’s possible – ANYTHING’s possible”), not false negatives. If thousands of chaotic scenarios are run – and NONE of them make it far enough – it should have raised our eyebrows all the way to the top floor.
Jeff’s piece adds biota-based corroboration to what the drift results were already saying – and suggests a potential alternative explanation for this flaperon and its curiously sized/placed passengers.
one more note and last about it;
MH17 DSG report contains interesting info about SATCOM and ELTs too, but possibly because of traffic density, inactivity timer in EU is preset to 15 minutes(?). Report almost matches with Almaz-Antey analysis, but leaves open the launch location tracking. But it clearly states that big trouble was the not closing the area for flights nor by Ukraine nor by EuroControl.
The German professor Herbig from Köln (or Cologne), who specialisis in Barnacles art Lepas, has offered help to the France investigators on day one the falperon was in the news… Never got a reaction from them though. He can distinquis between different types of Lepas. Lepas Australis only lives in the colder waters, where MH370 supposedly went down. For him it would be easy to find out if the Barnacles on the flaperon are the australis type, and thus compatible with the current search location. He can also tell how long they’ve been on the flaperon. He only needs shells !!! I can only come to the conclusion that the official investigators are not at all seriously trying to solve the mystery !!
@Carla, I have been in touch with Dr. Herbig, he was extremely helpful. One of the points he addressed, and which I didn’t explicitly address in my piece, is that there is considerable difference of opinion among the small community of Lepas experts as to just what species are represented on the flaperon. Apparently it can be quite difficult to distiguish these animals from their shells alone, soft-tissue examination is required (and ideally DNA analysis). Unfortunately not that much work has been done on how different species respond to different temperatures, so I question the blanket claim that the flaperon barnacles could not survive below 18 degrees Celsius–I’ve seen no evidence that the research to back up this claim has been published. The fact is, these are not very “charismatic” animals to most people (Lepas researchers would disagree, of course.)
BTW Herbig and his team have offered their services to Australian investigators and have been taken up on their offer–they want to do an analysis of the community of Lepas species to see if they can determine what waters the flaperon has floated through. The idea being that different species predominate in different parts of the ocean and so the relative abundance of each could hint at the path that the flaperon took as it was progressively settled by cyprids.
CosmicAcademy,
Re: “Why is the Sat logon nearly exactly at the time, where primary radar looses contact to the plane”.
In the previous thread I suggested a trivial explanation of this “coincidence”. However, it ruins a number of hypotheses (including ATSB and IG), so that without additional proofs it will be put on a shelf…
@Brock
There is a quite a catalog of reasons why the current search area is and was a non-starter. The location of the flaperon finding is in the category of “piling on”.
@jeffwise
Australia appears more engaged in their roles than others. With no expectations I forwarded your barnacled flaperon work to:
ICAO Paris
ICAO Montreal
ICAO APAC (Asia and Pacific)
BEA
JACC
ATSB
WSJ
DCA (took 2 days, 4 attempts to send because mailbox was full)
Although a standard media dept. reply, they were the only one to acknowledge
Dear Ms Crowe,
Thank you for your email.
The flaperon was found in French territory and as there is an active French judicial investigation ongoing, the French judiciary have taken responsibility for analysing it. The Australian Government through the ATSB (as an accredited representative on the Annex 13 investigation) has and will continue to offer what relevant assistance we can to the French authorities in their analysis of the flaperon.
Cosmic Academy,
Exactly what I always thought. Had MAS acted differently and RMAF alerted at that moment, after the 17 minutes of ping pong by the ATC’s, we may all not be sitting here. MAS was looking at a “projected flight path not suitable for tracking” when one of their fleet was presumed missing or not responding or not where it should have been at the time. Plus, 2 aircraft tried to contact it with no response, MH88 and the other in the Preliminary Report. What more red flag did they need at that point? Besides, logistically, wouldn’t MAS or ATC and RMAF be in the same building at KLIA or relatively close by? Would there have been a live person monitoring ACARS messages at MAS at that time of night, if so another red flag when the messages stopped. For that matter a live person in England monitoring the Rolls Royce engine data? Everyone was asleep at the switch and nonchalant THAT night?????
That is open to doubt and interpretation. The flaperon may not have been entirely watertight, but it doesn’t look particularly leaky either. Where are the big holes that allowed the water to get in? How many compartments in the interior? Even if there were holes, there would always remain fairly large pockets of air, reducing in volume as the flaperon was tossed around. In other words, it may have taken months until the water content and buoyancy was stable.
@Gysbreght
That is a very good point, IMO. It seems likely that there was a variable component to the buoyancy. While I doubt it would have a big influence on the drift conclusions (i.e. I don’t see there ever being enough flaperon exposed for the wind to have a significant effect), it could certainly influence the barnacle population.
@all
Well, Duncan weighed in recently (5 October 2015).
http://www.duncansteel.com/archives/1982
“Given various recent public statements by scientists who really should know better, plus of course the various silly comments on the internet by people who are not able to know better, this drift analysis is a welcome beam of sense and logic.” – Duncan
Of course, the “welcome beam of sense and logic” refers to the fact that the CSIRO statements don’t contradict the IG conclusions.
You cannot censure everyone (Duncan’s moderator style), so the next best thing is to label them as silly.
Pathetic really. We may as well all give up and go back to doing what we normally do with our lives miserable as that may be.
While I do not agree with the IG and ATSB conclusions relative to the terminus, I would never label them as silly. The constraints used to derive their conclusions are carefully articulated, and the analytics are solid. That does not mean, however, that the conclusions are correct. There is ample room for alternatives.
When you posit your pet theory as the only one possible, and label everyone else as ignorant and incompetent, isn’t that silly?
@Gysbreght
If someone did that it would be reprehensible.
The word “pet theory” is really a negative and ambiguous label. I am not even sure what it means in this context. Just because someone has a theory does not mean it is a “pet theory”. It is just a theory. I am happy to embrace all theories, and evaluate them on their own merits. If that evaluation has negative attributes (which I am quite happy to point out), it does not mean that ignorance and incompetence are associated with it.
@jeff
I think it would be extremely interesting if dr Herbig would get a chance to do his analysis of the Lepas species.
He states quite clearly in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwOO6-24wPU&feature=youtu.be
that if there are Lepas australis on the flaperon, this would confirm a crash at a location south west of Australia, in the colder part of the ocean. (Also that he can determin this species with just the shells.) Very happy to know that you picked up on this and spoke with dr Herbig!!
what I’m quite sure of is that many of those stubborn scientists including Duncan would claim it was a conspiracy if MH370 gets found somewhere else than in current search area, that’s how they are sure about their assumptions
if it isn’t silly then I don’t know what is
@jeff: you have multiple experts on record estimating a range of AGES for these barnacles – and now I see you have a range of estimated SPECIES. Surely the age estimate might be sensitive to the assumed species…?
This in turn suggests we refrain from establishing a maximum time-in-water until we nail down the species.
Having said this: even if we don’t have (literally) inside access to these barnacles, it would still be worthwhile nailing down these experts’ conditional age estimates (“if species x, then age estimate y”). Even this might lead us to a basic contradiction; e.g. perhaps the only species of a plausible age had to have survived waters of an implausible temperature.
@Dennis: could not agree more. If wreckage is found in the current priority search zone, this flaperon’s contribution to posterity will be Suspicious Contradictions 83 Through 88.
@carla, Thanks for that link, sehr interessant! Dr Herbig points out that the identification of Lepas australis on the flaperon would provide a good clue that the airplane went down in cold water southwest of Australia, i.e. in the current search area. However, various experts who have looked at photos have identified them as most likely belonging to other species such as Lepas anserifera and/or Lepas anatifera with likely some other species thrown is as well. It’s hard to tell just from photos! Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like Dr. Herbig and his colleagues will be able to examine the flaperon to settle the issue; it turns out that the Australian investigators did not respond to their offer of assistance.
The Australians can’t do anything right. Unbelievable they missed the flaperon floating past their coast!
@Brock, Different species do grow to different sizes, but what affects the growth rate more is the temperature and the availability of nutrients. That’s why I consider it fortunate to have the Mayotte boat as a reference–since it drifted through the same ocean (though not at exactly the same latitude) it should have picked up similar species of Lepas, and they should have experienced similar growth rates.
As for getting various experts’ estimates of growth rate, the simple fact is that not a lot of research has been done into the growth rates of Lepas, certainly not enough to distinguish one species from another.
With MH17 back in the news it’s interesting to compare the prompt disclosure of the forensics – as usual. From day one.
@ everyone:
I apologize if some feel the following comment is a distraction to the current thread, but at this slightly more quiet juncture I’d like to drop it into the mix. I feel this bit of overlooked news does have some relevance, and personally find it hard to share the indifference of most people (I don’t mean anyone on this forum) that tends towards not attaching any importance to the recent Maldives MQ-9 Reaper drone debris.
Gone virtually unnoticed by nearly everyone, its something I find hard to put to the back of my mind. To an untrained eye like mines, the size, distribution, and appearance of the barnacles seems incredibly similar to the ones on the top (smooth) part of the flaperon. Is this just a coincidence? Or do barnacles on smooth surfaces simply not grow past a certain length? Others on here can no doubt offer more informed opinions.
You can see pictures in the following articles:
Reaper drone debris: http://www.haveeru.com.mv/news/62312
Flaperon debris: http://www.smh.com.au/world/mh370-search-barnacles-on-piece-of-planes-wing-could-help-unravel-the-mystery-20150803-giqrd3.htm
A wing piece from a 777 and a fin from an MQ-9 washing ashore at about the same time… hmm…
But the only reaction to this has been dismissive – “drone crashes happen frequently, some might not get reported, therefore this has nothing to do with anything.” But can we really afford such complacency? After all, we don’t have much to go on, every seemingly irrelevant part of the jigsaw needs to be pored over, surely? Nor is this a generic container or just some driftwood. It’s part of an aerial object potentially emanating from the SIO (?), a Reaper drone dammit!
I’m not mentioning any all this because it ‘fits in’ to any theory I’ve proposed. And by no means am I suggesting “it’s-a-drone-so-lets-blame-the-Americans.” There are so many different possibilities here, one of course being that its entirely unrelated; but isn’t it downright lazy to sweep aside all others with a point blank statement of “drones crash so just move on?”
Searching online, I can only find mention of two drone crashes in the Seychelles (in Dec 2011 and April 2012). But to tie this in with Jeff’s article, if it had been from the Seychelles crash, I would’ve thought the debris would’ve had much more extensive barnacle coverage after 3 years drifting, possibly even having sunk by now? The barnacle growth on this debris seems a lot ‘fresher,’ almost matching the barnacle growth on the flaperon. And according to drift patterns, how likely is it for debris to travel from the Seychelles back up to the Maldives? (It may be possible, but I would’ve thought unlikely, or am I wrong in that assumption)?
Of course, all we have is one side of the debris, quite hard to draw many conclusions from that. But for me, the Maldives debris raised many questions. When did the drone crash? Has the military disclosed which crash it was? If not, how often do Reaper crashes go unreported? Do the barnacles bear any similarity to the ones on the flaperon? If yes, could drift models predict where the drone may have crashed? And so on. The Maldivian authorities removed the debris to have it investigated, but it all seems to have been forgotten.
If the barnacles really are similar, wouldn’t that throw up a whole host of other questions? First and foremost, is there a direct link to this debris and the flaperon? Could this have been a case of a Reaper possibly attempting to surveil a wayward aircraft, only to be shot down by a third (non-American) party? Could the Reaper have malfunctioned and accidentally collided with an aircraft?
Or on a more sinister note (and in support of Jeff’s speculations), could this piece of debris had been ‘planted’ by the same party that may have gone to all those lengths to plant the flaperon debris? An attempt to mislead experts by shifting suspicion in the direction of the US military? When I saw this news a few weeks ago, I immediately thought how ironic it would be if the last answer was actually closer to the truth, the hijackers’ meticulous year-long planning falling flat on a public too indifferent to bother joining the dots!
@Sajid, I think the point you raise is valid, I suspect that what you’re witnessing, with regards to the muted response the Predator debris received here, is a degree of learned helplessness. It has proven very difficult to get the authorities, including (especially?) the US, to answer questions about MH370 and related topics. So while I’d love to know the circumstances by which the Predator debris came to wash up on that beach, I rather despair that any effort I put into answer that question would bear fruit.
I suspect the Victor Iannello is feeling a fresh level of frustration after his recent very well-intentioned effort to pry loose a few answers to the many questions surrounding the March 8, 2014 radar data. And Brock is feeling the same after his efforts to pry open information about the drift modeling.
Inter alia, in revisiting that Predator debris image it does look to my eye like there’s a discernable Lepas line and algae zone.
@Susie, Belatedly, thanks for doing that.
Sajid: spot on. The answer is: no, we CANNOT afford complacency – if it is a coincidence that a drone piece is discovered in the Maldives within a month or two of the Réunion flaperon’s discovery, we should at this point be very careful not to rule out a connection.
And we should be even MORE careful not to heed the dismissive online chatter – I have a funny feeling much of this is orchestrated. Even if authentic, it is surely misinformed: one cannot consider each coincidences in isolation – and dismiss them one by one – but rather in AGGREGATE: the odds against ALL improbable coincidences happening by pure chance are becoming astronomical.
I agree and empathize with Jeff re: frustration levels, but when governments thwart efforts to uncover the truth, “helpless” is not the emotion in which I find myself awash. Seeing people in power so willing and able to abuse it galvanizes me to keep at it – because in their corruption, I hear the footsteps of our own doom overtaking us.
Sajid, if you have the time and energy to determine the drone’s owners, and hound/shame them into positively identifying where and when it crashed, I feel that would be most helpful.
Clive Irving has a new piece in the Daily Beast attributing the disappearance of MH370 to a fire from the lithium-ion batteries in the cargo hold. In my mind, there are some problems with this theory (like every other theory), but I don’t dismiss the possibility either.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/15/the-deadly-cargo-inside-mh370-how-exploding-batteries-explain-the-mystery.html
@Sajid UK
The incredibly abused “conspiracy theory” phase coupled with the brain farts of social media has confused the masses. Those that strive to posture as intellectuals feel certain theories beneath them and others just follow the ridiculously inept path of mass media. Your point is an excellent one, any reasonable theory should be considered until factual information dictates otherwise. The problem with most obscure theories is getting lost in the sandstorm of rolling information that often conflicts the truth. Collaborative effort is the main defense. Thanks for the creative alternatives you have given
@Victor
The battery fire hypothesis has been brought up countless times. I am surprised Irving is revisiting it with nothing new. His articles is filled with phrases like – potential, could happen, can be, quite possible,… a real bunch of drivel IMO. My opinion of Irving went down an order of magnitude reading this article.
The battery fire completely ignores that fact that the evidence strongly supports that the aircraft was actively piloted from KL, to IGARI (turn West), West over Penang, NorthWest turn after Penang) and for a FMT somewhere to the NorthWest of Penang. Planes do not fly (turn) themselves.
Dennis, the theory of the Irving article with respect to your comment is as follows:
“a fire initiated in the two pallets of lithium-ion batteries placed in the forward cargo hold—and the proximity of the cargo hold to the 777’s electronics nerve center—could have caused the loss of the communications and navigation systems by destroying the power supply line to them, but not the loss of flight controls.”
@Bruce
The operative is “could have”.
You could fly visually near Penang. Shah was intimate with this area. Yet the plane by-passed it.
@DennisW: I did not state the obvious problems with this theory because anybody here paying attention already knows them. I won’t dismiss the possibility that a battery fire somehow contributed. This is nothing new. As I have said before, I have yet to see a theory that does not have major holes.
@Victor
Yes, you mentioned that before (major holes in all theories). I left the comment unchallenged.
If the CI theory has major holes, I am unaware of them. Please enlighten me.
Sometime lurker here…
I thought it a curious coincidence, on this barnacle thread, that the batteries apparently came from Bayan Lepas:
“…before departure, March 7 last year. According to a report by the government of Malaysia (PDF), the “fresh” single cells making up the batteries were manufactured at a Motorola Solutions plant in Bayan Lepas, an industrial center 215 miles northwest of Kuala Lumpur…”
…especially given that “Bayan Lepas” apparently means, “The parakeet has flown away”.
“For instance, some individuals believe that MH370 went to Christmas Island, an Australian possession south of Java. In order for it to have arrived there, both the BTO and BFO data sets must be wrong.” Jeff Wise, 12/23/14.
If Jeff is correct, wouldn’t those be major holes, Dennis?