As we should all know by now, there has been what sounds like it will be a disaster of epic proportions. On Saturday, March 8th, Malaysia Air flight 370 vanished over the sea between Malaysia and Vietnam. This is a major mystery for several reasons: The plane, a Boeing 777, is one of the safest planes ever made, without a single crash until last year’s crash at San Francisco International Airport, which ultimately was blamed on pilot error anyway. It vanished in good weather with no distress call or transponder signal, but its last known contact showed it was way off course. To make matters worse, no trace of the plane of the plane has been found. No debris, no oil or fuel on the water, no wreckage, no nothing.

There is so much mystery surrounding it all that now the public can pitch in to look for evidence of the plane over the water from their own PC. Tomnod lets people use satellite imagery to scour the surface of the ocean looking for evidence of the missing plane, and tagging it if you find something. I had trouble getting it to run in the Chrome browser, but it worked in all others. You’ll need to click [Start Tagging] to begin your search.

It’s an offshoot of the concept of grid computing we discussed earlier, where many, many processors are being used as a singular machine to perform a task, and if you have a few minutes I certainly encourage you to take a look and see if you can find anything. Great things happen when complex issues are opened to the crowdsourcing model; remember when a bunch of gamers took less than a month to solve an AIDS-related problems that scientists had been working on for years? Good luck.