Bluefin On 12th Mission To Find Missing Flight 370
MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: Overnight, the Bluefin-21 started the 12th mission to try to find the plane. It's searching the last 10 percent of the narrowed down search area. That area was calculated based on where the pings from the data recorders were last detected. Now, some are wondering if those calculations were correct and if experts should try again. David Gallo is here, CNN analyst and director of special projects at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Let us discuss it while you are here. Good morning.</s>DAVID GALLO, CNN ANALYST: Good morning, Michaela.</s>PEREIRA: Let's look at this. This is that object of interest. You are an expert at this kind of things so I want you to look at this and tell me -- I'll stay in my lane as a news anchor.</s>GALLO: Lacking any evidence and if this washed up on a beach in Western Australia it would get your attention. It's got the rivets. Looks like the skin of an airplane. You can't fault anyone for drawing attention to it.</s>PEREIRA: Mary Schiavo said fiberglass connected to it doesn't point to it being --</s>GALLO: Right. You would have to know what's beneath that skin, but from the outside this part would certainly get your attention.</s>PEREIRA: But again, they're saying it is not connected.</s>GALLO: Right.</s>PEREIRA: Now authorities are saying it's not connected to Flight 370. All right, let's talk about the efforts, deep under water. We know we've talked about before in our oceanographic folks to talk about the currents and how the pings can be distorted under the ocean.</s>GALLO: Sure.</s>PEREIRA: Recap that for us for folks just tuning in.</s>GALLO: You have an underwater mountain like the zenith plateau south of the area they're looking at. The scale is distorted because this is a couple of miles of ocean water.</s>PEREIRA: A couple of miles.</s>GALLO: Yes. This is a tiny ship way up there and this is a tiny vehicle hanging down by a long cable. This is also much bigger than it really is. This would be a tiny spec on this type of topography. So what we're looking at is the sound emanating from here. Most people think the sound would come directly to the listening device but that's not true. This sound is bouncing off topography like this and getting bent around by ocean currents and ocean thermal structures so it's got all different paths that the ocean is taking that sound.</s>PEREIRA: Many say the ocean does play tricks with sound. I think this gives us an idea. It occurred to me those currents change. So from one day to the next you're not going to have a consistent --</s>GALLO: From hour to hour, the sun is constantly heating up and cooling down so ocean is constantly heating up and cooling down. The thermal structure is changing.</s>PEREIRA: It makes it challenging then if a ping is detected to know that it's going to be the exact same place where it's then detected again.</s>GALLO: Exactly right. Sure. I mean, the ideal circumstances if you're in the same place you're going to hear it again. That's not the way it works.</s>PEREIRA: Is there a way to test conditions so that they can sort of get a game plan going?</s>GALLO: Yes, I think many people think you can go out there and recreate that.</s>PEREIRA: You can't really recreate it, can you?</s>GALLO: Right. So you can go to a laboratory and set up conditions where you have maybe say we have a pinger at this depth and there's a mountain like this and then we have various --</s>PEREIRA: Let me get you to the drawing tool again.</s>GALLO: So we have various thermal structures. Layer of warm water here.</s>PEREIRA: You can recreate that model.</s>GALLO: Yes, you can do that on a computer and then make the sound happen and see what happens.</s>PEREIRA: Here's one of the challenges though. This topography is unfamiliar to us. We don't have this mapped in the South Indian Ocean.</s>GALLO: Yes, that's exactly right.</s>PEREIRA: That changes it for us. We don't know what we're dealing with.</s>GALLO: If you know the topography you can model it better in a computer but not knowing it, you really don't know where all the valleys are or all the peaks and what's sediment, what's not.</s>PEREIRA: Now in terms of the folks they're bringing in, we know there's an international team being assembled. It's a specific type of expert that's going to understand this type of thing.</s>GALLO: Acoustic experts especially underwater.</s>PEREIRA: Do you know if they're involved in the team?</s>GALLO: I would imagine they are. That's the kind of person you need, someone that understands the environment.</s>PEREIRA: We're looking back at the pings for a second. We know that you're instrumental in 447 Air France.</s>GALLO: Right.</s>PEREIRA: We know there were no pings, but there was surface debris and you know roughly where the plane was last.</s>GALLO: Sure.</s>PEREIRA: Even then searching in the wrong place.</s>GALLO: People said, you know, Air France you had the debris. The debris, we had a whole team of people retrodrifting it. Where did it come from because that was going to be the center of the hay stack? They were fairly confident. We're pretty confident the plane in that box. We spent two months inside that box day after day, night after night that team was out there. Found nothing at the end of the two months. It does -- it's difficult to rebound from that.</s>PEREIRA: So we could be searching in the wrong spot and it's not unreasonable to shift it again then.</s>GALLO: It's very -- wouldn't surprise anyone to find out that these pings were not necessarily from the plane or they come up empty handed after this search.</s>PEREIRA: Do you think these are from the plane?</s>GALLO: You know, got to go by what the Australians are telling us the ping rates were right, frequency is right. A lot of arrows point to this spot. Got to go with that. It's pretty much the only evidence we have that the plane is in this part of the ocean.</s>PEREIRA: Ten percent left for the Bluefin to search in this search area. We'll see what they expand and what other tools they bring in. David Gallo, really a pleasure. Thanks so much -- Chris, Kate.</s>BOLDUAN: All right, Michaela, thanks so much. Coming up next on NEW DAY, is Pope Francis breaking with Catholic tradition? What he reportedly told a woman who is married to a divorced man? What she can do and what the Vatican is saying about it. We are live with the details straight ahead.