It’s not every day that you need to talk to one of the world’s leading experts on goose barnacles of the Indian Ocean, but today is one of those days, so I considered myself very fortunate to get in touch with Charles Griffiths, an emeritus professor of marine biology at the University of Cape Town and author of the seminal paper “South African pelagic goose barnacles (Cirripedia, Thoracica): substratum preferences and influence of plastic debris on abundance and distribution.”
I reached out to Dr Griffiths by email and he graciously answered my questions about the sea life found growing on the Reunion flaperon after I sent him a more detailed version of the picture above.
Is it possible to identify the species of barnacle growing on the debris?
In this case it is possible to identify this as being Lepas anserifera striata on the basis of the small row of pits across the shell, which is characteristic of that subspecies.
Can this tell us anything about where the debris might have been floating?
This is not much clue as the species has a wide global distribution in tropical and subtropical seas.
Can you say in very rough terms how long it takes the barnacles to reach this stage of growth?
I cannot accurately gauge the sizes of the largest specimens from the image but goose barnacles grow spectacularly fast e.g. 21 mm head length ( i.e. Without the supporting stalk) in 21 days cited in one paper I have at hand. I have seen very large barnacles (as long as my finger) growing on a cable known to have only been in the water for 6 weeks!
UPDATE: To clarify a point raised by commenters, I asked Dr Griffiths a follow-up question:
Is it true that barnacles can’t survive in the open ocean? Is it possible for a piece of debris floating far out to see be colonized by Lepas anserifera, or would it need to be in a coastal environment?
No, that is not the case. These goose barnacles are in fact characteristically oceanic beasts and only occur in floating objects in the open sea. Reaching the coast is in fact a death warrant for them and any that get washed up die! Interestingly they seem to know whether an object is floating, so for example are common on kelp that is uprooted and floating but never occur on the same kelp when it is attached.
Can you tell whether the barnacles in that picture are alive or dead? If alive, how long can they live after being washed up?
If you find a washed up item that is fresh (same day) the barnacles will still be opening their shells and waving around their cirri (legs) to try to feed. Obviously in a still image cannot see this. However I can see the cirri projecting from some animals. These would rot away and drop off in a few days in a tropical climate, so this wreckage has only been washed up a couple of days at most. Also crabs and other scavengers love to eat goose barnacles and will clean off most within a couple of days. There is no evidence of feeding damage or headless stalks here, so that suggests to me this wreckage was collected and photographed within a day or two of stranding.
Thanks so much, Susan. Your kind words energize me.
@All: I actually have a hunch we are closer to prevailing than might be inferred from the media circus. When an octopus feels threatened, it injects a cloud of ink into the water; I think the many-tentacled creature behind the manipulation of the MH370 search may be realizing the “sleeper shark” of public accountability is surprisingly awake – and surprisingly hungry. While the ink may blind and frustrate us for a while, I am confident that, if we maintain each other’s energy, the shark will find its prey.
I must say, if (and I’m not saying it was) it was Zaharie’s intention to display the corruption and incompetence of Malaysia, he has succeeded. In all honesty, I truly despise those who are in charge in Malaysia. The way they have handled this has been downright disrespectful and incredibly agitating. I hate Malaysia.
Does anybody have any thoughts on whether the recently released sonar images of the seabed showing 2 pieces of debris has any reasonable chance of being the engines?
@Jay,
You mean after someone has suggested that the plane landed intact? Those could be engines?
The lines, to me, look like artifacts of either the scan or some processing. Why are they parallel?
But the real issue is the timing of this announcement. Hey, we found something but we have to wait until November. That looks like manipulation to me.
@JS,
That is not the sonar I was referring to. The one where it shows 2 rectangular looking things of about equal size fairly close to one another.
These:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/08/12/08/2B4A13BB00000578-3186523-This_sonar_image_taken_by_the_Malaysian_contracted_Go_Phoenix_id-a-77_1439363009279.jpg
Preceding every event related to the loss of MH370, 8th March anniversary, tripartite meetings, etc, and now post debris find the media has ‘coincidentally’ surfaced old stories related to the event.
One low noise example was the McKay oil rig sighting report reappearing in Feb this year in publications ranging from the UK (Daily Fail) to NZ.
Sarawak Report’s commentary on Malaysia has included reports that US conservative commentators & bloggers were employed to positively manipulate Najib’s image. SR repeatedly references Paul Stadlen, a key individual in Najib’s ‘Prime Minister’s Office’ information machine. Stadlen was a political lobbyist in UK prior to moving to Msia to lead APCO’s (PR) office there & then joining Najib directly.
It’s simply part of the landscape, social media included, that interested parties will work to influence their objectives.
:Don
Guarded Don,
You are right, it is the same old stories over and over. There is NOTHING new in this case. When you break it down to its very core, the only real factual evidence there is, is the Inmarsat data, the audio recording, scanty radars, and possibly now a barnacle encrusted flaperon. That’s it. And until they are ready to divulge the medical, mechanical, and criminal parts of the investigation, if there is one, we are operating at a loss. By continuing this “saving face” mentality it’s working in reverse for them and they are losing face to the world. But as one poster has said, we are not privy to the details of the investigation and it is not our right to know, it’s their investigation. Perhaps they fear it could be compromised by divulging information, or could it be, that they actually are as clueless as we all are? But we will all forge on because we do care.
@Jay those images from The Daily Mail were taken months ago, and were ruled to be shipping containers. The ATSB publicly released these through their operational updates at the time. Somehow the story got recycled and the Daily Mail reprinted it with the categories of importance for the objects the wrong way round. Quite how this came to be defies belief.
Please look closely at the photo…
http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/565335-flaperon-washes-up-reunion-island-25.html#post9080586
I put this comment out a week and a half ago and thought I should follow up on it.
“Some food for thought; most commercial aircraft I know of have shear points to let the engines separate to protect the fuel cells (wings) from rupture. Normal terrra firma impact projects them over the wing.
Have a look at the Ethiopian B767 attempting to ditch; does the engine go over or under?”
What I left out was watch the left wing; some of you probably worked that one out anyway. The right engine actually hits a reef; that’s why the wing comes off……a bit like a car hitting a brick wall. Hitting the reef is not a normal terra firma impact.
Back to the left wing which is the interesting one… the high speed ditching one…did it depart over or under?
The answer is………….it remained attached!
Food for thought I think!
OZ
On the rising from the depths theory going around for the flaperon.
If the aircraft sank to any where near the depths currently assumed; the honeycomb would have crushed every cell and every bit of air that would have been present.
That flaperon would have been well truly mangled and it wouldn’t have surfaced!
OZ
If the flaperon found at La Reunion came from MH370, it may be interesting to examine the damage inflicted to it. That damage indicates the loads that caused it, and may provide a clue as to how the flaperon detached from the airplane. To understand the damage, it is necessary to understand the structure of the flaperon. It is constructed as a wing. One or more spanwise spars take the bending loads, and a torsion box takes the torsion loads. From the pictures I have seen it is not clear whether the flaperon is actuated by PCUs at each end, or perhaps by a PCU at one end. In the latter case the torsion loads on the flaperon can be significant. The torsion box is composed of the spars and the skin between them, or perhaps a single spar and the skin in front of it, including the leading edge, the two end ribs and perhaps some intermediate chordwise ribs. If the flaperon is entirely filled with foam or honeycomb there would be no intermediate ribs.
The part of the flaperon aft of the torsion box is normally lightly loaded. The airloads in the tail of the chordwise pressure distribution are small, it is light structure with little mass. In the case of flutter the rear section is not subject to large airloads or inertia loads. It is unlikely that it separed from the heavier structure due to flutter or airloads in flight. It is much more likely that it failed under loads that it was not designed for, i.e. the impact with the water surface of the ocean.
@Gysbreght,
The flaperon has 2 PCU’s, one at each end. The structure is of sandwich skins with ribs (hollow on the inside).
OZ
@OZ,
Thanks for filling me in on those details. There is still a torsion box, and my remarks on the failure mode stand.
@Oz: I had the same thought about the intact flaperon rising from the ocean bottom. I don’t see how it could maintain its buoyancy while on the ocean floor. Any air pockets would either fill with water due to leakage or be crushed from the pressure differential. Not to mention that I find it unlikely that any part that survived the crash/ditch would break away from the aircraft due to deep water currents.
So why is Malaysia peddling this idea? It seems to be a lame explanation for the recovery of the flaperon and no other debris.
@Phil Webb: The story in the Daily Mail is totally false. We can only wonder how and why it was printed. Here is the ATSB’s attempt to correct the story:
https://www.atsb.gov.au/newsroom/correcting-the-record.aspx
@Jeff (OT?)
ad your latest tweet (sorry I am not using it, so want to respon here, it is linked in fact, I believe) … article about russian politics is originated by some bulgarian and retweeted by amereican journalist Alec Luhn, who also wrote articla about euromaidan more than year ago (below). I dont agree with point of view used in the article you retweeted – today. Year and half ago, I was totally confused what a mess is comming to us from Russia and Russians, because of all at that time known reports about Ukraine. I was also helping little bit to few my friends with some clothing and small money gift to support them from here, ya. But I was still curious what the hell is happening between those two nations (one country in near history) though so I searched deeply about it. It weas before MH370 and before Crimea take (few monts after that, I saw it as defense against warfare there – long before officialy sed by Putin itself). Then there was shootings on maidan, the victims, Heavens100 and so on… and then Crimea case – and I must say, I personally saw on their TV live the big mistake ukrainian parlament did with law to prevent use of Russian language on the east part of country (although quickly corrected, but it sparked in fact russian action on Crimea, which I realized few months after that) at that real time, everything looked easy and clear against Russia still… or mostly against Putin, “the (d)evil”. Becase for sure, all russians arent bastards, of course, but may be they have some creature on top… But then I thinked about it deeply more and searched what the hell is happening with this guy so bad so quickly – because before, I had nothing against Russia and him, may be only ignoring them all and having no problem with any russian professional in software development or microelectronics, they are in fact very smart and good guys often. So, later in april may be, I started to realize that their top guys , Putin and Lavrov arent any bastards at all too, in fact, quite the opposite. But also that may be half of russians has still the old-fasioned ugly cold-war mindset and Putin KNOWS IT well, but it is impossible for him to tell this aloud to them. All this brainstorming together with thinking about where the hell can be the lost B777. And then sparked idea, that its all as Formula1 – Putin is pushing hard for several years from pole-position the biggest gap possible at all cost, because now he drives for pit-stop not only to swap tyres, but to repair/rebuild whole engine… and he needs to help with it, what we already realized, so there are “sanctions” (they cant itself protect own market because of WTO rules), so BBC and more and more worldwide news in russian language… etc. But cold-war mindset has probably also whole Ukraine and half of rest of the world, including US, mostly right-wing neo-conservatives, also full of rascism and intolerance – I well remember at least one quite active participant on your twitter, as while looking back on timeline, I saw strange ugly and rascist comments against Obama etc. But your president is doing RIGHT things now, everything he does, from my point of view. So I dont like the neo-cons coldwar-mindset, although I myself was voting only right for last 20 years here – it all changed few years back, because of too much bad things and corruption; our current center-left government is bringing back common sense to everything, IMHO, and such creative (vs dectructive) bipartisan common sense and unity is returning worldwide, it seems, although it so often looks quite opposite in media. My 2cents.
And last but not least, if(?) there really something like spoof is possible, then only governments or very very rich and powerfull private groups (unlikely?) are able to do something that big. Iam not on any side now, still waiting what leaks next. But I am sure, that there are bad forces who are still pushing against common sense and unity for some reason, here in our country, in the US and everywhere; and thats not good, thats war. Personally I am in war with stupidity of “scientology”, as their business administrative courses arent far from fascism too, but nobody wants to see it, everybody quietly ignores and thinks I am mad and paranoid. Nope. It is also known that very poor eastern Europe countries as Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Belarus … are perfect operating field for any scientology activities and they want to dig here deeply and they and similar fraudulent nonsense cults have quite success there, also because of poverty and wish for better life.
http://www.thenation.com/article/ukrainian-nationalism-heart-euromaidan/
@VictorI
Looks like the Daily Mail article indeed got the categories backwards.
But did the article also get what Steve Duffield says/thinks wrong too? And must one also totally discount the sonar image assessment that has actual photos of 777 engines alongside the sonar images over at pprune? Seems to me this is good food for thought.
http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/565335-flaperon-washes-up-reunion-island-25.html#post9080586
Excerpt from the Daily Mail article–
By FRANK COLETTA FOR DAILY MAIL AUSTRALIA
PUBLISHED: 05:30 EST, 12 August 2015 | UPDATED: 15:30 EST, 12 August 2015
“An Australian recovery team scouring the southern Indian ocean claims to have made significant finds they consider to most likely be parts of the MH370 wreckage. The images are described as ‘Category 3’ sonar finds – images from the sonar scouring of the sea-bed are categorised as either 1, 2 or 3, with 3 being the most likely to be aircraft debris. They show two box-like images, and the other five long but very thin objects on the sea-bed. Steve Duffield, the managing director of Fugro Survey based in WA, told Daily Mail Australia that these pictures taken by his company and Malaysia’s Go Phoenix operation could provide the next breakthrough in the investigation. Fugro has been working in concert with the Australian Transport and Safety Bureau for more than a year in the $60 million MH370 salvage attempt, providing the vessels Discovery and Equator. The ships and 30-member crews are rotated weeks at a time and swapped roles once more on Wednesday. While Mr Duffield admitted the washed-up wing on Reunion Island late last month represented a very significant outcome, he is convinced that more evidence will be found through hard work in calmer sea conditions. It’s because of this that Mr Duffield warns the enthusiasm surrounding these Category 3 images should be kept in check for now as direct discoveries may still take a long time coming because of the severe winter weather. ‘It might even be November or December before it is really back in action because of the conditions out there,’ he told Daily Mail Australia. ‘That’s [when we] we are able to do broad area searches that identifies a number of contacts.’ Only when better conditions prevail, will the Fugro crew again be able to launch their Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). ‘We just can’t [launch] in these seas,’ he said. There are some contacts out there that still need to be identified, it [AUV] can get in and identify them. There are certainly some out there.’ Before its contract with the Malaysian government ended, Go Phoenix had ‘a number of contacts which look like 40 foot containers’. ‘We’ll get the AUV to cover those but they are most likely category two.’ Mr Duffield also hit back at critics claiming they have been looking in the wrong places for the doomed aircraft for the past year. ‘I think it is plain unfair, I’m not quite sure what they are talking about,’ he told Daily Mail Australia. ‘We search where we are told to search, that’s where it is and the analysis I have seen several times is quite strong. ‘The ATSB sets up the strategy, then there’s CSIRO analysis of the drift models. ‘It’s not small, 120,000 square kilometre expansion. It has been a fattening of the search area and it’s progressing as fast as possible, particularly with Go Phoenix stood down by the Malaysians. ‘Having two vessels fairly much constantly searching is pretty big, the most recent one in comparison would be AF-447.’
He was referring to Air France Flight 447 that crashed in the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009, on a flight to Paris from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared in March last year en-route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew on board. The Maylasian Prime Minister has gone on record stating tests undertaken by an international team of experts ‘conclusively confirmed that the aircraft debris found on Reunion island is indeed from MH370.’ “
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3186523/Sonar-images-deep-Indian-Ocean-led-Australian-search-team-believe-wreckage-Malaysia-Airlines-MH370-t-NOVEMBER-bad-weather.html#ixzz3ihct9xdV
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
The idea peddled recently by the Malaysians – that the plane was ditched artfully in the Roaring Forties by the pilot and sitting intact minus the flap somewhere on the ocean floor is just another of 1001 fairytales we’ve heard by now.
But it’s not so far removed from what more qualified minds have offered lately – only in more scientific and less flowery language.
While eventually one crazy scenario might turn out to be true we have to realize that the intact-ditching-by-pilot SIO scenario isn’t less crazy than other ideas offered by the supposedly loony fringe.
Our expert has spoken again.
the roaring forties: stormy ocean tracts between latitudes 40° and 50° south.
That’s where we find the lonely scientists of the IG …
@conspiracy folks
Since i came to learn that the colonization of the flaperon in question by pelagic goose barnacles anserifera striata can have taken place as early as immediately after impact 16 months ago, and the colony looks quite young i dare to ask some silly questions:
1) Prof. Griffiths said, that landfall of the flap was nearly the same time +- one day as it was found.
2) The search party of municipal employees started organized search on the very day.
3) They identified the debris as part of an airplane, where others who claim to have seen it before didn t
3) the serial number plate is missing in a manner you would expect from decommissioning of the part in a professional facility.
4) the lab in france leaked the finding 8 days ago, that there was a seal found inside the flaperon, that should not have been there according to maintenance records. Since the seals inside the flap account for the floatability of the part in water, there might arise suspicion, that this seal was added to make it float
@Cosmic, can you explain that again? How could a seal keep the part afloat? Not meant snarky. I just haven’t heard that before.
According to eyewitness accounts the part has been hanging around the island since May. Someone even claimed to have used it as a fishing table before it went afloat again. So, it’s very hard to judge when exactly the actual landfall was and what it would do to the colony of barnacles. It would be interesting if someone would take a look at the coastline and local currents in order to assess how that alternating between landing and floating could have worked.
@littlefoot
depends on the translation you use: seal = Dichtung in german. it holds air inside the flaperon, thereby making it more floatable. BTW wasnt my own idea. I met a space engineer friend today and told him about the seal and that was his immediate comment without one second of thinking.
Well for sure, since the flaperon was beached only couple of 20 to 40 hours before the photographs were taken, the Barnacles must have had a live sustaining environment when the part was drifting in the intertidal part of the littoral. I am not sure how this would work with this particular species but most barnacles on the european coasts can live in intertidal waters.
@Gysbreght
“the roaring forties: stormy ocean tracts between latitudes 40° and 50° south.
That’s where we find the lonely scientists of the IG …”
Yes. Where is Gary Larson when we need him?
@DennisW – http://usercontent2.hubimg.com/209665_f520.jpg
@DennisW
Quote
Yes. Where is Gary Larson when we need him?
End of quote
Gary Larson would be on the side of the smart people (i.e. the lonely scientists).
Enough said!!!!!
La Reunion Island is hounded by sharks:
http://www.thejournal.ie/reunion-island-sharks-2267986-Aug2015/
So, should the flaperon also have shark bite indentations? Would shark bites make a mark on a flaperon?
“Would shark bites make a mark on a flaperon?”
On the trailing edge perhaps?
@Cosmic, I think something got lost in translation here. From all I’ve read “seal” was in the sense of “mark” or “stamp” which was put there by MAS in order to mark repair or modification done. That’s why MAS tried to claim the flap immediately as theirs.
@Phil Webb: As I have posted previously, Steve Duffield from Fugro told me that he was “terribly misquoted”, and was expecting to see a retraction from the Daily Mail. You can read and trust the Daily Mail at your own peril.
@Gysbreght So, the trailing edge could have been munched off by sharks? Should be easy for the investigators to tell if it was.
@VictorI
I would not expect a retraction from that rag.
Frank Coletta, author of the Duffield piece, is much more at home writing about “face transplants” and the like. Not sure how he pulled the Duffield assignment.
@littlefoot: My understanding of “seal” originally agreed with yours, i.e., mark. The Malaysians seemed to be referring to something like that. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/malaysia-airline-mh370-maintenance-record-seal-conclusive-proof-flaperon-missing-aircraft-1514454
Other info has referred to air seals between control surfaces. Here’s a video of a loose one:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TIGVhW_N1w.
They get replaced during maintenance.
I agree that there is some sort of confusion.
@Lauren H
I believe this would be a more appropriate Gary Larson cartoon as it relates to ‘the lonely scientists’.
http://scienceinseconds.com/cmsFiles/pageImages/Gary%20Larson%20-%20creationism%20explained.gif
@littlefoot – While living in Germany, friends would complain to me about the difficulty of the English language. We can have one word that means many different things and/or we have two different pronunciations and meanings for two words that are both spelled the same way.
Initially, I had thought the same as CA that the word “seal” as related to the Flaperon meant a gasket that prevented the movement of fluid from one space to another. After listening to the Malaysian transport minister again, I believe your interpretation is correct. In this case, the “seal” is a stamp or marking left by MAS maintenance that they completed some work on the Flaperon. If there is a MAS maintenance marking on this Flaperon, it must have come from MH370.
BTW, in addition to the first two definitions, there is an animal we call a seal.
@Joe T
Creationism as opposed to the Darwinian notion of a common ancestor with apes? We teach evolution as dogma in our schools today along with the “Big Bang”.
You don’t need the back of a very big envelop to show that the genome differences between man and apes are large enough that given the known rate of mutation the required changes could not have occurred in the age of the earth. No matter. The physical similarities are striking.
Relative to the Big Bang, scientists have been looking for dark matter for over 50 years, and have yet to find any. It has to be there for the theory to work. In fact more than 80% of the mass of the universe needs to be dark matter. So there should be a lot of it. Again, the observed expanding universe is an alluring model to play in reverse.
My point here is that consensus is a powerful tool when used cautiously. It is crippling when it is used to suppress alternative conjectures.
BTW, I am an atheist.
Mr. Wise, thank you for the information on the barnacles. I was hoping someone was going to come up with some real information on the barnacles. Yes, when you want real information and not conjecture talk to a scientist.
For those who believe conjecture is reality please read the following words from Charles Griffiths:
……cannot accurately gauge….
Obviously in a still image cannot see this.
…so that suggests to me this wreckage…..
As any good scientist the good professor is showing us that one’s opinion can only go as far as the facts that are in front of you. When you turn wild speculation into reality you are going down a rabbit hole.
The following is what I have gleamed from the information on the barnacles:
1. The distribution of the barnacles is wide spread.
2. The growth rate can be very fast.
3. The barnacles will only grow on objects that are floating in the open sea.
4. The barnacles that are washed up on a tropical shore will die in a few days.
The following is what I think we have learned about MH370 as it relates to the information on the barnacles:
1. The odds that the flaperon is a plant is slim and none.
2. The flaperon was found almost as soon as it landed on the beach.
3. If we roll back the film for the flaperon it will not let us have a better idea about the location of the plane.
4. The damage on the flaperon will give us a lot more factual information on how the plane hit the water. The barnacles are useful but only in a very limited manner.
Note: If the barnacles and the flaperon make the Christmas Island (a landing or a near landing) scenario less likely, I can see the ‘Christmas Island’ people performing their own tests on the barnacles and computer simulation on the MH370. This would be like the ‘Big Foot’ people performing a rigorous scientific examination on the existence on Big Foot—a hopeless cause.
@Joe
CI people?? You could stage a CI theory convention in a very small closet.
In fact, I was thinking of changing my login to Dennis (no love) W.
@Lauren, thanks for sparing a few thoughts about the difficulties of multilingual discussions. 🙂
Your explanations are correct. “versiegeln” which means to “seal off” has a literal (Cosmic Academy was hinting at that meaning) and a transliteral meaning, which probably came from sealing something off from other influences, or keeping something confidential. I inherited a “Siegelring” from my father which can be used for sealing letters by dropping molten sealing mass (a kind of Chinese lacquer which can be heated with a candle flame) onto the letter envelope and then you press the ring’s head into the still flexible mass. I was fascinated by this as a kid – and so I got the ring.
I’m sure we’re looking at something more like the latter procedure when we’re talking about the MAS seal. But I sure would like to know how it looks like and how MAS puts it on aircraft parts.
And why is the animal (in German “Seehund” or “Robbe”) called “seal” also? It could give the sentence “the seal kept it afloat” a whole new meaning 😉
Yes, because we do care. And, because they (and I mean the Malaysian authorities) give us every impression that they don’t.
:Don
@DennisW
Quote
CI people?? You could stage a CI theory convention in a very small closet.
End of quote
O.K. Let us put this to a test.
If you believe the following statement is true (with some qualifications) please leave your name below:
Statement—The Christmas Island (a landing or a near landing) Scenario is no more real than Santa Claus.
1. Joe T.
2.
3.
4.
If you have any qualifications please state same.
The only “Malaysian authorites” we hear anything from are politicians. Not a word from the safety investigation since they published their 500+ pages of Factual Information, and the only information released from the criminal investigation is that they have no suspect. Let’s just hope that the French judges will continue to be more forthcoming.
seal (n.2)
fish-eating mammal with flippers, Old English seolh “seal,” from Proto-Germanic *selkhaz (compare Old Norse selr, Swedish sjöl, Danish sæl, Middle Low German sel, Middle Dutch seel, Old High German selah), of unknown origin, perhaps a borrowing from Finnic. Seal point “dark brown marking on a Siamese cat” is recorded from 1934, from the dark brown color of seal fur; compare seal brown “rich, dark brown color,” by 1875. Old English seolhbæð, literally “seal’s bath,” was an Anglo-Saxon kenning for “the sea.”
Thanks, Arthur Sorkin,
It’s truly amazing what one can hear while “Listening to barnacles”.
@Joe, Santa Claus was a real person – a bishop in a town called Myra, which is in Turkey nowadays.
So, don’t be too disdainful of the CI scenario. I don’t champion it necessarily. But it is compatible with all known data and might be better compatible with ditch scenarios as well as drift models to La Reunion. The barnacles might also be able to tell a story but they haven’t spoken,yet.
Anyway, hard arguments are welcome. But doubting the existance of Santa Claus isn’t one of them 🙂
@Arthur, thanks. Explains the origin of the word for the animal “seal” well. It has Germanic origins, while the seal on the flap comes from the Latin word “sigillum” if I’m not mistaken.
And our quite destructive new kitten looks like a seal with ears and without flaps and flippers, although she’s fond of water. She’s a mixture with Siamese ancestors.
@Joe T.:
(FWIW: I thank you for the materially more conciliatory tone of your more recent posts. Still sounding a bit like me when I first hopped arrogantly into this forum, but better.)
Below are your 4 facts (I’ve added a bit of detail to 2 – to which I trust you don’t object):
1. The distribution of the barnacles is wide spread.
2. The growth rate can be very fast (1mm/day) – especially in warm waters.
3. The barnacles will only grow on objects that are floating in the open sea.
4. The barnacles that are washed up on a tropical shore will die in a few days.
Now: I propose to you a thought experiment: suppose you’ve been told a flaperon was discovered on Réunion Island, and that investigators are confident it drifted there from the southern 7th Arc.
Here’s the key part of the thought experiment: suppose you have ZERO knowledge of the ACTUAL flaperon’s appearance.
You are asked to describe what you EXPECT it to look like. Using ONLY the above 4 facts – plus the obvious fact that, to get from A to B, it would have had to be drifting in the open ocean – in warm waters – for a year or more – please describe your best estimate of the size of the largest goose barnacles.
***
I’m not suggesting this is a smoking gun – we’re still a LONG way from that, in verifying both the robustness and relevance of these expert opinions – but if you did the thought experiment correctly, I think you would have to admit that your “slim and none” assessment derives from trust in authority alone, and has been arrived at DESPITE – not because of – the expert scientist’s facts.
@Dennis: never confuse “low probability” with “no love”. No amount of disdain for a “slow, lazy curl & fall” flight path will ever drown out the affection I feel for anyone able to laugh at themselves.
@littlefoot
Be careful. Joe is a consensus kind of guy. Next thing you know you will be in one of his polls.
Likewise with bigfoot. My ranch borders the Mendocino National Forest which is ground zero for bigfoot sightings. Most of the locals have seen one or two over the years. Personally, I have not seen one, but most of my forest travel is on a dirtbike which is not conducive to sneaking up on them.
Back on topic. It now seems obvious that “seal” is meant to refer to some sort of maintenance mark placed on the flaperon. It could be rejected for any number of trivial reasons i.e. date does not match MAS records etc.