MORE ON MH370 AND THE WORK AHEAD TO SEE IF THE DEBRIS IS FROM THE PLANE

The families of MH370 victims are now seeking greater compensation in light of the flaperon discovery, Cate Gower reports.

Following the discovery of the plane debris washed up on Reunion Island, aviation lawyers told Reuters that family members of passengers who were on board MH 370 are resuming efforts to receive greater compensation.

Joseph Wheeler, special council at Maurice Blackburn Lawyers in Melbourne, told Reuters that the discovery “is triggering renewed monitoring and recommendations to families”. He stated that “if there is evidence that the aircraft has failed, that very well may trigger a wave of lawsuits from around the world”.

Trying to locate the MH370 crash site using ocean currents is akin to searching for a "random person" in a large city, Australian oceanographer David Griffin has told AFP.

While Griffin and other oceanographers say the discovery on the island of Reunion fits in with their large-scale modeling of how debris drifts across the Indian Ocean, there remain a mind-boggling number of variables in the journey of any single piece of flotsam.

"The job we are trying to do now is to reverse the modeling and backtrack it," said Griffin, who works for Australia's national science agency, CSIRO. "But really, the source could be anywhere in the east Indian Ocean."

Australian officials have denied rumours a volcanic eruption could scupper the MH370 investigation, Jonathan Pearlman in Sydney reports.

Though officials are aware of reports of a possible volcano eruption, they said they were not expecting it to disrupt the search.

Le Piton de la Fournaise, a volcano that is a key tourist attraction on Reunion Island, is being evacuated after the island's volcanic observatory, the OVPF, warned that an eruption was an "imminent possibility".

An aviation consultant has told Forbes magazine that barnacles found on the debris could help investigators track down the black box.

John Goglia, a professor at Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology, wrote:

If that analysis [of the barnacles] indicates unique characteristics of a particular area of the ocean, it might help focus the search efforts for the black boxes, which will be invaluable to unlocking the mysteries of what happened to this flight.

Reports that around ten MH370 investigators were evacuated amid fears of a volcanic eruption on the island have been dismissed by a local journalist.

Pierrot Dupuy has written a scathing blog post about the "media's distortion of facts" over the investigation on the island.

Several outlets - including the Daily Star and the Daily Express in the UK- carry stories this morning which claim that around ten MH370 investigators have been evacuated amid fears of a volcanic eruption.

But Mr Dupuy wrote: "We had to expect that journalists - or at least certain people claiming to be journalists - would deform, exagerate and sensationalise what is actually happening in Reunion," he writes.