On March 8, 2014, Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia, to Beijing, China went missing with 239 people aboard. The circumstances surrounding the aircraft’s disappearance led to various hypotheses to explain the event and to suggest the location of where the plane entered the water.

In a recent study by Lumpkin (2016) looping trajectories of surface drifting buoys were extracted from the global drifter dataset and analyzed in order to examine the distribution of submesoscale to mesoscale vortices. Over 15,000 looping trajectory segments were identified worldwide.