Unidentified material washed ashore near Western Australia town, possible MH370 debris

Police in Western Australia have attended to a report of material washed ashore 10 kilometres east of Augusta and have secured the material, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre in charge of the search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean said in a statement.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) is examining the photographs of the material to determine whether further physical analysis is required and if there is any relevance to the search of the missing flight MH370, the statement said.

"The ATSB has also provided the photographs to the Malaysian investigation team.

"No further information is available at this time. Any further information will be made available if, and when, it becomes available," the statement said.

This is believed to be the first report of possible material from MH370 that has washed ashore since the search started in the Indian Ocean.

Previously, what was thought to be possible debris from the missing aircraft had turned out to be nothing more than wooden pallets, nets and floating garbage.

The huge amount of garbage in the ocean has hampered the search efforts for MH370.

During the initial stages of the search, satellites kept picking up images of objects in the water but none of the objects were linked to the missing plane.

Experts had said that when jetliners crash into water, the amount and size of debris can vary greatly depending variables such as the plane's altitude, the angle it went down, and its speed.

They had highlighted examples of crashes where the debris was so fine that "it took a lot of reconstruction to figure out" what part of the plane it came from.

In the wreckage of EgyptAir flight 990 that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 1999, the floating debris were all very small in size, reports said.

In the case of Air France flight 447 crash 2009, rescuers and salvage crews found hundreds of floating remains, including 50 bodies, uninflated life jackets, seat cushions and the plane's complete tail fin; but it was only two years later that they managed to locate the main wreckage on the ocean floor.

The mini-submarine in the hunt for flight MH370 has completed more than 80% of an area believed to be the best hope of finding wreckage from the aircraft but nothing of interest had been found.

Australia had vowed today to keep searching for missing flight MH370 despite no sign of wreckage after almost seven weeks, and as bad weather again grounded aircraft.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott had admitted that the search strategy may change if seabed scans taken by the mini-submarine failed to turn up a trace of the plane, which vanished on March 8 with 239 people on board.

"We may well re-think the search but we will not rest until we have done everything we can to solve this mystery," he had said.