Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Ocean Trash Makes it Difficult to Find Plane

Malaysia Flight 370 disappeared on March 7 and officials are still searching for evidence of where it could have crashed. Thus far, the search efforts have found nothing but garbage and pollution in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

This has complicated the flight search, since time has been wasted jumping from location to location in the ocean only to find floating garbage. Radar data and satellite imagery are the tools being used to find remnants of the plane, but even such advanced technology is having a difficult time.

Flight 370 is believed to have crashed in the southern Indian Ocean and officials narrowed the search to an area of 200,000 square miles. Over 1,000 miles west of Australia is where much of this ocean garbage is being uncovered. New Zealand airman Andy Scott has been part of the worldwide search for the missing flight. He told the Associated Press that his crew spotted 70 objects within four hours this past Saturday--all trash.

The day after the flight disappeared, officials thought they spotted something of importance in the waters near Vietnam, which would have been the first lead. When they got closer, all they found was a mound of moss-covered trash. In addition to the waters near Australia and Vietnam, those close to Malaysia and Indonesia have also turned up garbage, only to falsely raise the hopes of searchers.

Officials say that a big issue is that the debris spread throughout the search areas actually resemble the expected scatter pattern of the Flight 370 crash. Curtis Ebbsmeyer is a Seattle oceanographer who studies sea-bound trash and has been closely following the search party efforts for the missing flight.

"Everything that humanity does is reflected in the debris out there," he said in this Christian Science Monitor article. "Household garbage, remnants of space shuttle rocket boosters, spilled contents of shipping containers, and lost fishing equipment traverse the globe on the oceans' currents."

The currents, he says, resemble mixing a bowl of cake batter. It takes three years for the currents to complete the circle from the Cape of Good Hope in Africa all the way to the Western Australian coast in the Indian Ocean. Imagine how much trash and debris have been pulled into those currents over time. That's where the missing Malaysian Flight 370 is thought to be.