It has been called the oceanic equivalent of the butterfly effect.
So chaotic are the currents in the southern Indian Ocean that two identical objects, dropped into the water just metres apart, can end up floating hundreds of kilometres away from each other in a matter of days.
It is a phenomenon Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer at the University of NSW, knows well.
His research this past summer involved dropping buoys with global positioning systems into a patch of the southern Indian Ocean just east of where the hunt for missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370 is now centred.
The rate at which those buoys drifted apart, after starting from virtually the same location, was extraordinary. Three months on and Dr van Sebille said they were more than 1000 kilometres apart.
He estimated that a piece of debris in this part of the ocean could drift 100 kilometres in a day.
''The idea of the butterfly effect is that, if a butterfly flaps its wings, then something really big happens somewhere else,'' said Dr van Sebille, underlining the difficulties surrounding the search for MH370. ''This is kind of the oceanic equivalent of that … Two pieces of debris that landed in the ocean 10 centimetres apart might now be hundreds of kilometres apart.''
France became the third nation to publish satellite images that show ''potential objects'' in the Indian Ocean, after Australia and China had already released images that show possible debris from the Boeing 777.
All of the sightings are in an area south-west of Perth. The debris in the earlier Australian image was about 2500 kilometres south-west of Perth and the Chinese sighting, captured two days later, was about 120 kilometres ''south by west'' of that. The French sighting is believed to be about 850 kilometres north of the current search area.
Dr van Sebille said any potential sighting of debris in the southern Indian Ocean was significant because it was one of the most pristine environments, largely devoid of plastic and debris.
He said there was a known ''garbage patch'' in the Indian Ocean where debris tended to gather, similar to one in the Pacific Ocean. However, the Indian Ocean patch was further north of the current search area, at about the latitude of Perth.
Dr van Sebille said the unpredictability of ocean eddies was demonstrated in 1992, when a shipping container holding nearly 29,000 plastic bath toys, including rubber ducks, spilled from a cargo ship during a storm in the north Pacific Ocean.
Oceanographers began tracking the toys' movements and, 10 months after the incident, the first toys began to wash up along the Alaskan coast.
In the years since, they have been found washed up on the shores of the US, South America and Australia, while others were found frozen in Arctic ice.
