spot, although they say they are confident they are looking in the right place any way, but it will dispel a lot of conspiracy theories. we can only open that this piece more debris will be recovered in that area and perhaps some closure for those 239 families. jeffrey thomas, live in perth, auls australia, thank you so much. pleasure. a closer look at that piece of debris and what it may tell investigators. reporter: this piece of debris is about seven feet long, three or four feet wide and we re now told it is consistent with what you would find on a 777 made by boeing. let s bring up a model of the missing plane and talk about where you would find it on the plane. our aviation analysts say it would likely be on the backside of the left wing, right in here. a controlling flaperon as they call it.
a gyre is essentially a rotating circulation as far as what the oceans are doing. they rotate in a circular fashion. the reason that happens is the earth spins on an axis. if it didn t we wouldn t have that. the north pacific gyre is the one responsible for taking the tsunami debris from japan and taking it to north america. we will focus on the indian ocean gyre. that is counterclockwise because we are in the southern hemisphere and particularly interested in the northern flank of that here and why debris would move east to west. you can see the movement has that counterclockwise flow. if you are on the northern side you will get debris moving east to the west. that s a general circulation but there are nuances with the with circulations as well. we talk about these eddies that sometimes form because of different topography, different
would come away when the aircraft impacted the water. that s a typical situation. it s not really going to lead us, tell us too much about the final moments of the aircraft. we know about the indian ocean gyre. the currents in the indian ocean that go counterclockwise. given the fact we know the movement of the current, why hasn t this area around madagascar been looked at before? well, the answer to that question is the indian ocean is a vast ocean. the modeling showed debris may turn up in this area between about 12 and 24 months depending on a bunch of factors. it was simply too difficult to do that and more a matter of waiting for something to wash up that was thought to be the best
is salinity. it will be nuanced here. as richard mentioned it will be difficult, regardless of that, to trace something that washed ashore in reunion all the way back to the search area here. that s what they are going to look at here. as you can see here, this is live current feed from earth school.net. we can track the ocean currents and you can see to the south here some of the eddies that begin to form. it takes a while. there s understoodlation unless t undlations. it will be difficult to do the reverse engineering but we have something to start with the debris. thank you, ivan. this massive peets of debris, the flaperon found by people cleaning the coast. is this just one piece that floated there by itself?
china sea. and then it moved west to the strait of ma lack ka, where the last point of radar contact with the plane was seen. the search soon shifted dramatically south to the indian ocean. where the plane is believed to have veered off coast and flown for hours. final location is only believed to be because of a series of hand shake pings that the plane sent to a satellite. the search teams have combed vast areas of the ocean floor and are continuing to do so today. they are hunting for any traces of the 777. the malaysian government declared the missing plane an accident and all of its passengers and crew were presumed dead. richard is joining us now with more on this piece of debris which may be from mh370 or may not. everyone says it looks like it