Investigators don't have access to the black box from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, but barnacles could be the next best thing.
The disappearance of the plane and its 239 passengers back in March of 2014 left people around the world puzzled about how such a large commercial aircraft could go missing without a trace. This week, what appear to be traces of that ill-fated flight finally washed up on the island of Reunion in the West Indian Ocean: barnacle-covered bits of an airplane wing. It turns out that the small crustaceans coating the outside of the debris might be just as useful in solving the mystery of the flight as the piece of the airplane itself.
"As anyone who has seen a TV show like Bones or NCIS knows, the critters that live on a piece of forensic evidence tell us a lot about where it has been," said Brian Helmuth, a professor at Northeastern University's Marine Science Center, in a statement.
Barnacles are small marine crustaceans that have a hard outer shell for protection, because they cannot run away from predators. They are sessile animals, meaning that once a baby barnacle decides to call a particular spot home, it stays there for the rest of its life. As a result, they're essentially living tracking devices.
Older barnacles also tend to be larger, which means that the size of the barnacle provides information about how long the wing was underwater.
Different species of barnacles are found in different parts of the ocean, so identifying those on the piece of the airplane's wing will give scientists a sense of where it has been. Investigators could even take this source of information a step further by collecting genetic information from the barnacles and using that data to more precisely determine where the wing pieces picked up the barnacles.
All of these clues could help investigators determine where the Flight 370 crashed and how deep into the ocean the plane sank. In the coming weeks and months, scientists hope to reveal the secrets with this barnacle "black box."
Photo: Thomas Quine | Flickr
