Australian officials are refusing to call for a new search for the remains of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 even though a team of their own scientists has significantly narrowed their estimate of exactly where the crash site is.
In fact, Dr. David Griffin, the team’s leader, has told The Daily Beast that he has dramatically revised down the area he suggests should be searched from 6,700 square miles, the estimate made last December, to just three “hot spots.”
These fall within two strips of ocean just 62 miles long and between 12 to 18 miles wide, reducing the search area to less than a third of the original.
This new precision is the result of an extensive and continuing international scientific effort led by the Australian-based Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, CSIRO.
Using Australia’s most powerful super computer Griffin’s team has for many months been re-creating the path of debris from the Boeing 777 found on beaches in the western Indian Ocean. By April they were confident that this work had led them to a much more exact idea of where the debris had originated—in other words the place where most of the jet remains at a depth of as much as 18,000 feet.
