Tag: lost

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Investigators to revive search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight

By: Cassidy Delamarter

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A University of South Florida geoscientist created a new method that can reconstruct the drift path and origin of debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which went missing over the Indian Ocean with 239 passengers onboard. 

Gregory Herbert, an associate professor in the School of Geosciences, was inspired the moment he saw photographs of the plane debris that washed ashore on Reunion Island off the coast of Africa a year after the 2014 crash.

“The debris was covered in barnacles, and as soon as I saw that, I immediately began sending emails to the search investigators because I knew the geochemistry of their shells could provide clues to the crash location,” Herbert said. 
As an evolutionary and conservation biologist, Herbert studies marine systems with a particular focus on shelled marine invertebrates, such as oysters, conchs and barnacles, tiny crustaceans known to stick to many types of surfaces. Over the last two decades, Herbert created and refined a method to extract ocean temperatures stored in their chemistry. He’s utilized this method to determine the ages and extinction risk of the giant horse conchs and investigate the environmental circumstances surrounding the disappearance of the Jamestown colony. 

Barnacles and other shelled marine invertebrates grow their shells daily, producing internal layers similar to tree rings. The chemistry of each layer is determined by the temperature of the surrounding water at the time that the layer was formed. In this study, published in AGU Advances, Herbert led an international research team to conduct a growth experiment with live barnacles to read their chemistry and for the first time, unlocked temperature records from the shells of barnacles. 

After the experiment, they applied the successful method to small barnacles from MH370. With help from barnacle experts and oceanographers at the University of Galway, they combined the barnacles’ water temperature records with oceanographic modeling and successfully generated a partial drift reconstruction. 

“French scientist Joseph Poupin, who was one of the first biologists to examine the debris, concluded that the largest barnacles attached were possibly old enough to have colonized on the wreckage very shortly after the crash and very close to the actual crash location where the plane is now,” Herbert said. “Sadly, they have not yet been made available for research, but with this study, we’ve proven this method can be applied to a barnacle that colonized on the debris shortly after the crash to reconstruct a complete drift path back to the crash origin.”

Up to this point, the search for MH370 has spanned several thousands of miles along a north-south corridor deemed “The Seventh Arc,” where investigators believe the plane could have glided after running out of fuel. Because ocean temperatures can change rapidly along the arc, Herbert says this method could reveal precisely where the plane is located.  

Even if the plane is not on the arc, Herbert said studying the oldest and largest barnacles can still narrow down the areas to search in the Indian Ocean. 

“Knowing the tragic story behind the mystery motivated everyone involved in this project to get the data and have this work published,” said Nasser Al-Qattan, a recent USF geochemistry doctoral graduate who helped analyze the barnacles. “The plane disappeared more than nine years ago, and we all worked aiming to introduce a new approach to help resume the search, suspended in January 2017, which might help bring some closure to the tens of families of those on the missing plane.” 

This research was done in collaboration with Ran Tao, USF spatial geoscientist; Howard Spero, professor emeritus from University of California, Davis; and barnacle experts and oceanographers Sean McCarthy, Ryan McGeady and Anne Marie Power at the University of Galway.

AR #78

The Secret Search for the Missing Map of Columbus

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Lost Map of Ancient Astronomer, Found

A medieval parchment from a monastery in Egypt has yielded a surprising treasure. Hidden beneath Christian texts, scholars have discovered what seems to be part of the long-lost star catalogue of the astronomer Hipparchus — believed to be the earliest known attempt to map the entire sky.

Scholars have been searching for Hipparchus’s catalogue for centuries. James Evans, a historian of astronomy at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, describes the find as “rare” and “remarkable”. The extract is published online this week in the Journal for the History of Astronomy. Evans says it proves that Hipparchus, often considered the greatest astronomer of ancient Greece, really did map the heavens centuries before other known attempts. It also illuminates a crucial moment in the birth of science, when astronomers shifted from simply describing the patterns they saw in the sky to measuring and predicting them.


The manuscript came from the Greek Orthodox St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, but most of its 146 leaves, or folios, are now owned by the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC. The pages contain the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, a collection of Syriac texts written in the tenth or eleventh centuries. But the codex is a palimpsest: parchment that was scraped clean of older text by the scribe so that it could be reused.


The older writing was thought to contain further Christian texts and, in 2012, biblical scholar Peter Williams at the University of Cambridge, UK, asked his students to study the pages as a summer project. One of them, Jamie Klair, unexpectedly spotted a passage in Greek often attributed to the astronomer Eratosthenes. In 2017, the pages were re-analysed using state-of-the-art multispectral imaging. Researchers at the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library in Rolling Hills Estates, California, and the University of Rochester in New York took 42 photographs of each page in varying wavelengths of light, and used computer algorithms to search for combinations of frequencies that enhanced the hidden text.


Nine folios revealed astronomical material, which (according to radiocarbon dating and the style of the writing) was probably transcribed in the fifth or sixth centuries. It includes star-origin myths by Eratosthenes and parts of a famous third-century-bc poem called Phaenomena, which describes the constellations. Then, while poring over the images during a coronavirus lockdown, Williams noticed something much more unusual. He alerted science historian Victor Gysembergh at the French national scientific research centre CNRS in Paris. “I was very excited from the beginning,” says Gysembergh. “It was immediately clear we had star coordinates.”
(https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03296-1)

AR Issue #60

Document Reveals Archimedes’ Genius

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The Lost Tales of King Arthur

90% of Medieval Manuscripts of Chivalric and Heroic Lore Have Vanished

New research finds that, while the Knights of the Round Table have won global fame, most medieval English heroic or chivalric stories have been lost. Meanwhile, more than three quarters of medieval stories in Icelandic and Irish survive to the present, in an unusual pattern suggesting that island ‘ecosystems’ helped preserve culture.

The findings come from an international research team, including Oxford experts, which has applied models used in ecology to help estimate the loss and survival of precious artefacts and narratives from different countries and ancient cultures. Their findings are published in the journal Science, with Mike Kestemont (University of Antwerp) and Folgert Karsdorp (KNAW Meertens Institute) as the main authors.

We estimate that more than 90% of medieval manuscript copies of chivalric and heroic narratives have been lost….Moreover, we were able to estimate that some 32% of chivalric and heroic works from the Middle Ages have disappeared over the centuries

Dr Katarzyna Anna Kapitan, an Old Norse philologist and Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford, says, ‘By using statistical methods borrowed from ecology, we were able to add to previous scholarship.’

‘We estimate that more than 90% of medieval manuscript copies of chivalric and heroic narratives have been lost. Encouragingly, this corresponds roughly to the scale of loss that book historians had estimated using different approaches. Moreover, we were able to estimate that some 32% of chivalric and heroic works from the Middle Ages have disappeared over the centuries.’

Dr Kapitan continues, ‘Our study revealed significant differences in the survival rates of medieval works and manuscripts in different languages. Our estimates suggest that Irish tradition of medieval narrative fiction is best preserved, while English tradition suffered the most severe loses.

‘We know around 81% of medieval Irish romances and adventure tales, but only 38% of works in English. Similarly, around 19% of medieval Irish manuscript copies survive, but only 7% of English.’

The team used ‘unseen species models’ from ecology to gauge the loss of narratives from medieval Europe, such as the romances about King Arthur, or heroic legends about Sigurður the dragon slayer or the legendary ruler Ragnar lóðbrok, known to wider audiences from the series Vikings. The estimates of loss and survival they obtained are compatible with the scant historic evidence.

We found notably low estimated survival rates for English. It has the lowest survival rates in the study for both works and manuscripts. 

#119

The Quest for King Arthur’s Lost Tomb