A wing flap from Malaysia Air Flight 370, which disappeared in 2014, has washed up on the island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Africa, roughly 2,300 miles away from where most believe that the plane crashed, on the opposite side of the ocean near Australia. So how did the wing flap make it the two thousand miles across the the Indian Ocean?  It appears to have ridden the Indian Ocean gyre, along with the rest of the trash cast off into the Indian Ocean.

In March 2014, we posted about how British satellite firm, Inmarsat, combined high tech analysis with very basic navigation to estimate the flight path of MH370. Their best estimate put the plane down in a remote area of the Indian Ocean off Australia. As soon as they started searching the area, one thing became obvious. There is a tremendous volume of garbage floating in the Indian Ocean. Finding the debris field from a crashed plane was made far more complicated by all the floating trash. The blog Live Science summarized it nicely, as “finding … a needle in a garbage patch.”

The trash can be caught in the Indian Ocean gyre, one of five huge rotating ocean currents caused by the Coriolis effect. These huge currents have the effect of concentrating floating garbage. What is referred to as the Indian Ocean garbage patch has formed within the Indian Ocean gyre.  The other four major oceanic gyres; the North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific and South Pacific; each have their own “garbage patches” associated with their rotating currents. The North Pacific garbage patch is, depending on whose estimates you believe, either roughly the size of the state of Texas or larger than the continental United States.

While locating any part of the crashed plane is extremely valuable to investigators, the fact that debris from the plane has been riding the Indian Ocean currents and has traveled 2,300 miles away from the presumed crash site must make finding the location of the downed plane all that much more difficult.