New Debris Clues (Imagining the Impossible, part 1) [S2Ep52 video]

For a year and a half, I've been collecting barnacles on drifter buoys to understand where MH370 debris came from. Here's what I found

In July of 2015, fifteen months after Malaysica Airlines Flight 370 disappeared into the night, a piece of its right wing washed ashore on La Réunion island in the western Indian Ocean. Investigators hoped that barnacles growing on the wing could offer a clue as to where the plane had crashed. But unfortunately, so little was known about these creatures at the time that no inferences could be drawn.

Over the last year and a half, I’ve been carrying out a project to collect scientific drifter buoys that have come ashore, in order to collect the barnacles growing on the and create a database to finally show in detail how these animals grow, so that we can at last understand what they’re trying to tell us. Now that we’ve collected more than a dozen buoys from all over the Pacific and Indian Oceans, a picture is starting to emerge that is quite at odds with what investigators expected -- and indeed, even thought possible -- at the time.

Today’s deep dive is the first of a three-part series, timed to coincide with the 12th anniversary of MH370’s disapperance, in which I discuss the three pillars of certainty that underpin investigators’ belief that the plane must be in the southern ocean, and why each of those three unquestioned beliefs could actually be wrong.

Also in this episode I respond to a critique from Paul Kennedy, the man who once headed up the seabed search conducted by the Australian government, and I explain why the seabed search for MH370 might be permanently over.