The Australian-led search for missing flight MH370 will continue regardless of whether wreckage found this week turns out to be from the aircraft, the government says.

“Australia’s priority and our responsibility is to do whatever we can to locate the last resting place of the aircraft,” Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss told a press conference in Sydney.

If the 2m piece is confirmed to be from the missing aircraft, the discovery would at least “eliminate some of the fanciful theories that have been around that the aircraft is secretly parked somewhere on land in another part of the world,” he said.

It was not possible to calculate exactly where the debris had drifted from to reach Reunion Island, he said, but its estimated path through the ocean currents was consistent with the plane going down within the 120,000-square-kilometre designated search zone of the southern Indian Ocean.

- dpa