thank you to tom foreman for that report. talking about the currents and how the piece traveled. the indian ocean gyre that moves counterclockwise. a good explanation and models to explain how this happened. the movement is so slow here which is why this has taken so long to wash up ashore here. good to see you. we will talk about the global circulation pattern and with the ocean currents here. focus on the search area and where they had been focusing the search and where it continues to be the focus. this is west of australia now. we are taking you, 2647 miles, generally 4,000 kilometers. the question is how did we get debris from west of australia to move essentially 4,000 kilometers all the way to reunion island. perhaps we have debris along at madagascar itself. we want to look at the global ocean currents here. that has to do with the gyres.
indian ocean and so it s basically a big conveyor belt. anything that gets caught up in this could drift up and over towards madagascar. it s been quite a while. you remember back in 2011 after the tsunami in japan and we started see thing debris wash ashore on the west coast of the u.s. about nine months later. so that was because of the north pacific gyre moving from west-to-east. so it s something that we look at, of course, because that is what ultimately will carry things from one side of the ocean to another. but it s not that easy. very, very complex when you re talking about these currents. this is what we re looking at in the the indian ocean gyre goes around like this but you see all these little swiggles in here basically, depending on where storm is, depending on the winds, a lot of things can get out of that main gyre and get caught up in all of these little eddies. so that s what we ve been talking about as well when the plane first went missing. so you talk about the g
you re starting to say, well, is it a 76? is it an a-310 from another incident in that part of the world. is it 370. then you start looking at pieces where it might go. the flap actuator, where that would have assembled on to it. and you start piecing together exactly the part of the aircraft that would have been. let me bring in jennifer gray. jennifer, if you could, richard was just talking about the distance from where this was found to australia where they believe this might have gone down. can you talk about the currents and what might have brought it to that area if it is, indeed, belonging to mh-370? we talked about these ocean currents so much around the time we lost touch with mh-370 and we were doing covering the search in such great detail. and we talked a lot about this indian ocean gyre. this basically goes north and around to the other side of the
floating garbage. recently, a chinese ship in search of the airport came across trash instead. even sea life can t tell the difference. fish, sea lions, birds, they all ingest this junk thinking it might be food. you know, i hear this talk about there being 300-plus pieces from the aircraft. there are 300,000 plus pieces of trash already there. reporter: the indian ocean gyre is not the only one that exists, there are also two in the pacific and two in the atlantic. they form when ocean currents bounce off the continents and create a vortex of swirling water, which pulls the debris from the shores to the center of the ocean. the gyre in the indian ocean is thought to be about 2 million square miles. keep in mind the entire united states is just under 4 million square miles. and this garbage patch is not just huge, it is on the move, traveling about half a mile per hour or about 12 miles per day and it may be carrying parts of the plane with it.
why locating the missing plane is such a challenge. satellite images once thought to be debris fields now floating garbage. recently they came across trash instead. even sea life can t tell the difference. fish, sea lions, birds, they all ingest this junk thinking it might be food. i hear there s talk about 300 plus pieces from the aircraft. there are 300,000 plus pieces of trash already there. reporter: the indian ocean gyre isn t the one that exists. there are two in the pacific and one in the atlantic. they bounce off the southern continents and create a vortex of swirling water that brings debris to the center of the indian ocean. keep in mind the entire united states is just under 4 million square miles. this garbage patch isn t just huge on the move traveling a