Lost in a swirl of trash? The search for MH370 complicated by abundant ocean garbage

As we head into the fourth week of the so-far-fruitless search for missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, one thing is becoming abundantly clear: there is an awful lot of garbage floating around in our oceans.

Efforts to find the lost airliner — a Boeing 777 with 239 people on board flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing — have already been plagued with complications since it vanished without a trace on March 8. The only twinges of hope so far have come from apparent sightings of debris in the Indian Ocean by satellites and planes. However, so far, all of this debris has turned out to have no connection to the flight at all.

It's all just garbage — what environmentalist Captain Charles Moore referred to in an Associated Press article as "the detritus of civilization."

[ Related: Full audio transcript of Flight 370 communications between cockpit, air traffic control ]

Apparently, not a day has gone by that those conducting the search for MH370 haven't encountered some kind of trash floating around. The problem is that the area they're searching (off the west coast of Australia) just happens to be at the eastern end of one of the extensive gyres that swirl around in our oceans. A gyre is a naturally-occurring ocean current that forms simply due to the liquid oceans reacting to the rotation of the Earth (the Coriolis Effect). There are five major gyres (two in the Atlantic, two in the Pacific and one in the Indian Ocean), along with several other smaller ones scattered about the world's oceans. In addition to transporting heat and nutrients in the ocean and playing host to many different forms of life, they also tend to collect a good deal of the trash that ends up in the ocean.

Hank Green, of the Sci Show, talks about the North Pacific gyre in this video, but nearly everything he says can be applied to any of the gyres (estimates of how much garbage each one holds varies, though).

Although plenty of plastic debris in these gyres is broken down into very small bits, there's a tendency for some of it to clump together, forming what can look like large pieces of debris in satellite views and from the vantage point of planes flying overhead. Additionally, there's all the actual larger debris out there to contend with — crates and containers from ships, as well as pieces of buildings, docks, boats and other large objects that have been swept out to sea by tsunamis over the years.

[ More Geekquinox: Winter's grip still holding fast in northern Ontario, parts of Atlantic Canada ]

There's one other complication all this adds to the search for MH370. Not only will the gyre confound the search by throwing an unknown number of decoys into the mix, but if there is any actual debris floating in the ocean from the airliner, the gyre will move that along with everything else. The West Australian Current, which is where the search efforts for debris are concentrated at the moment, can reach speeds of around 35 centimetres per second at this time of year. That may not sound like a lot, but it can add up to over 30 kilometres per day, which can carry the debris far away from where the plane may have gone down.

The search for the missing flight will be going on indefinitely, according to what the Australian prime minister recently said, with efforts currently focused on the idea that it crashed into the ocean. However, given how hard it is to find and clean up all this garbage (even with finding more of it now), the amount of it floating around is only going to grow, promising to turn a potentially-long search into a very frustrating one.

Geek out with the latest in science and weather.
Follow @ygeekquinox on Twitter!