To watch Deep Dive MH370 on YouTube, click the image above. To listen to the audio version on Apple Music, Spotify, or Amazon Music, click here.
For a concise, easy-to-read overview of the material in this podcast I recommend my 2019 book The Taking of MH370, available on Amazon.
Over the course of this episode and the next, we’re going to reveal a major break in the case: new data that upends the conventional understanding of MH370. It’s the first significant break since the final report in 2017, and it’s a doozy.
But before we do that, we have to set the stage. For the data to have meaning, you have to understand its context.
What we’re going to be talking about has to do with a method of dating events that occurred in the past. It’s similar in a way to carbon dating, in which scientists use the radioactive decay of an isotope of carbon to determine how long ago something died. Or dendochronology, which uses patterns in tree ring growth to allow scientists to identify the time period during which a piece of timber grew.
To set ourselves up for the big reveal, we’re going to explain how this methodology works, and why we can consider it as a robust and rigorous method to determining how long a process has lasted.
Then in our next episode, on the 10th anniversary of MH370’s disappearance, we’re going to reveal the new evidence that is going to change our understanding of the case, explain what it means, and talk about its repercussions.
In this case, the dating method involves Lepas barnacles. This is an organism we’ve talked about a lot already. We first met them in Episode 18: The Flaperon, when we talked about how the first piece of debris washed ashore on La Réunion Island. A striking feature of the flaperon was that it was covered all over in fleshy-stalked shelled creatures, which scientists realized could be used as a clue.
In Episode 19: The Impossible Drift we looked at some puzzling aspects of the debris, including the fact that marine biologists were stumped as to how Lepas could have grown on a part of the flaperon that stuck high up out of the water. We went more deeply into these issues in Episode 20: Lepas Don’t Lie with renowned invertebrate researcher Jim Carlton.
A uniting concept across these episodes is that Lepas barnacles can be used as a robust and reliable way to measure how long debris has been in the water. Combined with drift modeling, they can tell you when and where something went in the water. In the case of MH370, they can tell us what happened to the plane.
To make sure that everyone’s on the same page, we want to make crystal clear how Lepas can be used as a clock, so let’s walk through it in a step-by-step fashion:
1. Debris that floats in the ocean accumulates marine life that can act as a data logger. One of the most important species for this is the goose barnacle Lepas anatifera, which is common in tropical and subtropical waters all around the world. It’s very happy living in waters between 20° C and 30° C, or from 68° F to 86° F.
“Assuming they have enough food, and the temperature is good, barnacles will follow a steady growth progression,” says Cynthia Venn, a professor of environmental science at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania.
It’s important to note that the cyprids, the juvenile form that attach themselves to floating objects, are quite common in the ocean, the currents are constantly swirling them around. There’s not part of the ocean that doesn’t have cyprids in it, ready to colonize anything that falls in.
Venn studied barnacles collected from NOAA’s Tropical Ocean and Atmosphere array of research buoys dotted across the central Pacific Ocean. She observed that they would progressively grow bigger the older they got. They also cover more and more of a floating object as time goes by. As we’ve seen, after a while capsized boats and buoys can have these absolutely massive medusa-like masses on them.
2. The important thing to understand is that this is a one-way process. A Lepas colony is not like my sunflower bed in the New York suburbs, where the deer will come and eat a garden down to stubs.
Scott Bryan is a marine biologist who studies how organisms grow on piece of pumice blown into the ocean from volcanic eruptions, these things are sterile when they go into the ocean because they start out as molten rock, and when he would find them they would inevitabley be colonized by marine organisms depending on how long they’d been in the water.
He said, “If there is nothing older than two months growing on it, we would interpret this that the pumice had not been floating in the ocean for more than three months (it tends to take a few weeks before you see biota attached). So that would mean the pumice is fresh in the water either because of a new eruption, or it had been washed back into the ocean after being stored on beach for sometime.”
3. Scientist use mathematical models to convert their size into their age. Their age reveals how long the piece has been in the water. This can be used for all sorts of things. Studies have looked at using Lepas to track wildlife-endangering “ghost nets,”find missing boats and even decipher mysterious deaths.
Growth isn’t linear. Growth is slow at first as the cyprids are getting established, then they grow really quickly, and then after a few weeks or months they slow down, and eventually as they reach their maximum size they slow down.
Once the shells get near their maximum size, you can’t use their size to tell how old they are anymore. But if they’re within a certain range of vigorous growth, you can use the size to determine their age. Using drift models, scientists can work backwards to trace where the pieces came from
4. When the flaperon was discovered on La Réunion very little research had been done. So when then first examined the flaperon French investigators had to go all the way back to the 1950s to find a paper that had some bearing on how fast Lepas grown.
They found that there were a lot of barnacles that were around 25 mm long and the very biggest were 36 mm, so they used a formula from a 1958 paper and plotted out the growth like this:
5. But there’s a catch: Lepas grow differently according to water temperature and nutrient density. The relevance of Bell’s data was very questionable, since it was based on cursory study of barnacles growing in the temperate waters of the North Atlantic.
Henry Goehlich led a team that looked at how Lepas grew in the cold waters of the Homboldt Current off the coast of Chile. They found that after three months the Lepas had stopped growing at about 20 mm in length. Thomas Mesaglio and his team studied a related species growing in southeastern Australia and found that they got as large at 48 mm in as little as a month.
To use Lepas as an accurate gauge of drift time, you need a baseline. You need to establish how quickly they grow in that particular part of the ocean, and how big they can get.
5. In 2020 the first experimental results were published which looked at barnacle growth in the same ocean that the flaperon drifted through. A team led by Martin Stelfox observed Lepas barnacles growing on bouys in the Maldives. They observed growth that looked like this:
This graphs shows the size of the average barnacle, which reached 28 mm by the end of the experiment at 110 days. The largest specimen was 35 mm. This is intriguingly similar to the size of barnacles found on the flaperon.
But it leaves open a big question: at this stage, have the barnacles gotten close to their maximum size, where we can use their length to gauge their age anymore? Or do they grow still bigger, so that we can still use their size to tell us how long they’ve been growing? We need another data set — something that will put the growth rate of these 36 mm barnacles in context.
That basically will serve as the Rosetta Stone to tell use how long the debris floated in the southern Indian Ocean, and allow us to finally understand where the MH370 debris entered the water.