S2Ep10 Fighting Over Noise

Strenuous objections to an influential paper

In episode 6 we discussed a recent paper by Usama Kadri that examined whether the crash of MH370 should have been detected by a network of underwater microphones. Kadri argued that it should have been easily detected. The paper received a lot of attention in the mainstream press. Among the community of marine hydroacoustic researchers, it stirred consternation. In today’s episode Dr David Dall'Osto of the University of Washington explains his misgivings about Kadri's work.

In that earlier episode, titled “Tracking the Sound of a Plane Crash,” we talked about how Kadri’s analysis presented something of a “Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” situation, because while Kadri found an event that was similar in timing and location to the presumed crash site of MH370, it wasn’t close enough to really be a plausible match. Since earlier in the paper Kadri had made a compelling case that if a plane had gone in the water it should have been detected, based on historical analogues, then the fact that there was no good match implied (I argued) that the plane hadn’t impacted the ocean.

Kadri’s paper got a lot of attention in the popular press, which for the most part presented his work uncritically. But as I’ve argued over and over again, science isn’t just about retrieving data and interpreting it. It’s about arguing about the data and what it means. Because all of us are imperfect. We make mistakes, we leap to unsupported conclusions. Only by hashing things out collectively can we make sense of the world around us.

David Dall’Osto is a senior research scientist at the University of Washington Applied Physics Laboraory. He studies hydroacoustic detection and last year coauthored a presentation with Alec Duncan of Curtin University in Perth, Australia, called “Revisiting the acoustic detections made in the Indian Ocean at the time of the loss of MH370.”

There were three main questions I put to Dr Dall’Osto. First, did he agree with Kadri’s conclusion that hydrophone network had historically been able to detect even low-speed, low-energy airplane crashes? Secondly, did he agree that the event that Kadri highlighted in his paper might be associated with MH370? And finally, did he agree with Kadri’s proposal that we try to nail down the sensitivity of the hydroacoustic network by deploying bombs (or some other way of creating noise) near MH370’s presumed crash location?

It turns out that not only does Dr Dall’Osto have deep concerns about Kadri’s paper, he has reason to question whether search officials are even looking in the right part of the ocean.