Scientists believe they’ve found answer that could explain what happened to MH370

Scientists believe they could find the crash location of flight MH370 which disappeared in 2014 by analysing barnacles.

The plane's last communication came about 38 minutes after take-off with the aircraft over the South China Sea and 16 minutes after that, radar tracked it going dramatically off course.

While the plane had been flying north, it abruptly turned west and the last primary radar contact was an hour later.

The plane went missing, with all 239 people on board presumed dead and the aircraft's crash site was never discovered - but some debris have since been found.

The first piece of debris from flight MH370 was the plane's flaperon - part of the wing - which washed up on a beach on the island of Réunion some 16 months after the plane disappeared.

Réunion is located off the east coast of Madagascar which likely means that the debris had likely travelled across most of the Indian Ocean to wash up on the beach.

The science coming into it is that barnacle shells grow differently depending on what temperature the water they're in.

Each layer of the shell can tell scientists what kind of water the barnacle had been through in the past, meaning that if they think they know roughly how long the barnacles were latched on they can analyse the shells to get a clearer idea of where they were.

Researchers believe the largest barnacles latched onto the debris a very short time after the plane went down so if their shells can provide a clue as to the temperature of the water they were formed in that would massively narrow down the areas to search.

That's much more accurate than it was when the flaperon was first found, where they could only estimate within a margin of two degrees.

If this works then they could theoretically track the path taken the barnacles, and by extension the debris they were latched onto, arriving at the area where flight MH370 went down.