Malaysian MH370 update - Curt Lewis

Scientists Say MH370 in One of Three 'Hot Spots'

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 Australia's 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.

The team's confidence in this calculation increased when they retrieved satellite images of the southern Indian Ocean taken on March 23, 2014, two weeks after the airplane disappeared. These showed 12 "probably man-made" objects floating at a point that Griffin's team believed would be consistent with where debris would have drifted westward in the time elapsed since the crash.

The problem with these images is, though, that they are not sharp enough-they are not in high resolution-for experts to distinguish between the known profile of debris from the jet and other debris in the sea.