Finding MH370
Finding MH370
Citizen Science [S2 Ep22 audio]
0:00
Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -30:45
-30:45

Citizen Science [S2 Ep22 audio]

Sailors in Tonga volunteer to retrieve Lepas data

In today’s episode we discuss a new approach to gathering the Lepas data that could help us finally understand how long MH370’s debris was in the water. By tapping into a worldwide community of oceangoing sailors who congregate on the social media site No Foreign Land, it might be possible to retrieve data from barnacles that are just about anywhere in the ocean. I tried out this approach by reaching out to cruisers Leslie Graney and Peter Sheaff after I noticed that their boat “Itchy Feet” was quite close to an interesting Global Drifter buoy near the island of Vava’u in Tonga. With incredible graciousness and pluck Leslie and Peter immediately set out on a quest to intercept the buoy, while I looked on from halfway around the world. While the experiment didn’t succeed in achieving all of its goals, it was a great demonstration of how the idea could work in the future, and gave us important ideas for improvements going forward.

Discussion about this podcast