Oceanographer Erik van Sebille says more debris from the downed AirAsia QZ8501 aircraft could begin washing up on beaches.
Van Sebille said the Java Sea is very different from the open oceans because it is an inland sea.
"An inland sea is actually not very deep, it's actually so shallow that during the last ice age 20,000 years ago, this area was above sea level, this was a forest," he said.
As well, the type of equipment required to go down to 40 or 50 metres - the depth in which the downed aircraft is believed to be resting at - is easily obtainable.
"Almost all navy have it, anyone who works in off-shore engineering, from wind farms to oil platforms, they have equipment that can go down to 40, 50 metres," he explains.
This makes the search and retrieval process "much easier" compared with the 4km depth that people are searching for with MH137.
He also says the sooner you go in to search for the aircraft the easier it is.
"Because if you can imagine this plane hitting the water, it might break off some piece of debris but these pieces of debris are going to be moved by the ocean currents; the ocean currents are going to spread them out," he said.
"Some pieces are going to be higher above the surface, and are more wind driven. Other pieces are less buoyant, and it can sit deeper and the ocean currents ... Over time this patch of debris will grow exponentially and the fact that we've now found it in three days has been really helpful."
He said if this wasn't the case, it means the area in which people are searching would be far greater than what has currently been pinpointed.
Van Sebille is confident officials will be able to recover all the critical elements of the crash.
"I think as we start scooping up all the pieces of debris, we will see a lot of things that don't belong to the plane because this is a filthy part of the ocean."
"Like many parts of the ocean, it is full of trash, full of abandoned fishing nets, full of garbage from land based areas."
"The Java Sea is really an enclosed basin, there's not a lot of strong current flushing everything out, and there's a lot of fishing going on ... so that means there's such so much things, so much garbage floating on the surface that it'll be very hard to distinguish pieces that are off the plane from pieces that have just been there for weeks, years."
But above all, time is the critical element here. Notwithstanding the various difficulties that come with searching during the Indonesian monsoon season, like choppy waters or poor visibility from mud runoffs into the sea, Van Sebille believes the operation could be wrapped up soon.
"The thing that drives this salvage operation is finding out what happened to the plane, and recovering all the people that were onboard. If that happens quick, then it could only be a matter of weeks maybe."
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