A crew member of a Royal New Zealand Airforce (RNZAF) P-3K2-Orion aircraft helps to look for objects during the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in flight over the Indian Ocean on April 13, 2014 off the coast of Perth, Australia. Greg Wood – Pool/Getty ImagesA piece of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 might have washed up on a tropical island. If investigators do find that the piece belongs to the lost Boeing 777, it would answer a lot of questions. One question it will not answer however, is where the plane went down.Most non-conspiracy theories have put MH370’s crash site somewhere in the vast, southeast Indian Ocean. If this is true, it would make sense that a piece washed up on Réunion Island, about 580 miles southeast of Madagascar, because the currents in that part of the ocean run generally west. But anything more than that is just too complicated.“The problem is ocean currents have a lot of variation in them,” says Colleen Keller, a senior analyst for Metron, Inc, a company that specializes in computational modeling. “Maybe if you were looking at a day you could trace a piece of wreckage back, but over the course of several seasons the only thing we can say is about the general direction of the currents.”For one, the Indian Ocean is vast, with seasonal currents. Those currents have eddies, those eddies interact, and their interactions create changes in the parent currents. All that swirling about makes it very difficult to untangle which currents the wing was bobbing around in. And that’s not even counting the typhoons, tropical storms, and minor squalls that stirred things up. “It’s just a washing machine of water that’s not very predictable,” says Keller.And it’s not just the computation of those swirls and squalls that’s difficult. Those models are running mostly on assumptions. “Usually you come up with a baseline, then throw some buoys and catch some actual data, bring that back to the model, then go back and get more data,” says Keller.Even if this piece of debris doesn’t solve the mystery of where MH370 crashed, it still might offer some closure for the victims’ families if investigators confirm it belonged to the missing Boeing 777. “It can put to rest the idea that the airplane is still out there,” says Keller. The Indian Ocean may be huge and mysterious, but at least it could be part of an answer.Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.