Oceanographer says look further north for Flight 370

The oceanographer who led American adventurer Blaine Gibson to Madagascar where he found a potential debris field from the missing Malaysia Airlines jet said on Thursday that drift modeling suggested that Flight 370 (MH370) could have crashed slightly north of the current search area.

The comments come after Gibson on Tuesday handed Malaysian authorities in Kuala Lumpur three pieces of debris and personal belongings found on Madagascar beaches in June, which he suspects came from the Boeing 777 that vanished with 239 people on board during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014.

Another six pieces of potential debris found by Gibson are waiting with Madagascar authorities for Malaysia to collect. Western Australian University oceanographer Charitha Pattiaratchi said he had told Gibson that Flight 370 debris was likely to concentrate on Madagascar.

Pattiaratchi's earlier advice had led Gibson to Mozambique where he found debris in February that experts later determined came from Flight 370.

"He rang me from the Maldives and said: where should I go? Should I go to Rodrigues, Mauritius, Reunion, Madagascar, Mozambique, South Africa?" Pattiaratchi said Thursday. "I said: 'Your best bet is the northeast part of Madagascar,' which is where he went."

Pattiaratchi said the same modeling led his team of oceanographers to suspect that the airliner could have gone down just north of the search area in the southern Indian Ocean.

"The best guess that we think is that it's probably around the Broken Ridge region, which is slightly to the north of the area that they're looking at," Pattiaratchi said.

But, he said he could not say that the aircraft had not crashed in the 120,000 square kilometers of seabed currently being searched southwest of Australia.

Officials from Malaysia, China and Australia will meet in Kuala Lumpur on Friday to discuss the future of the search, with fewer than 10,000 square kilometers remaining to be scanned by ships towing sonar equipment. The underwater search has not yielded a single clue.

Pattiaratchi's modeling was based on how long the first piece of confirmed Flight 370 wreckage took to reach La Reunion Island off the African coast a year ago.

Another four pieces found along shores on the southwest of the Indian Ocean have since been determined as almost certainly from Flight 370.