Page 38 - Ocean Currents News Today

>> i want to get christine in here. what is the biggest challenges to an ocean search, 17 days after the plane vanished, ocean currents, weather, what is the biggest challenge? maybe both? >> i think both. i think at this point, again, were still looking for a needle in a hay stack. youve got teams out there that are ready to deploy that are on site in some areas and theyre not finding debris. theyre being hampered by winds that come in, ten foot waves, 15 foot waves, making their job impossible...

Location of the crash site is to back calculate. what youre seeing there was performed about dr. steve morey. what it shows is the probable path way from the 8th of march to the 16th of march by 10,000 objects put into the water and tracked with a simulation model. >> now, when you look at those pieces, yesterday they spotted debris and go back the next day, the ship couldnt find them. to give our viewers a sense of how quickly the field of play can change, how much can one piece of floating deb...

Determine whether or not they are wreckage from the plane? >> its -- its hard to imagine but ive seen pictures of the seas. they are seeing some pretty high seas there, wolf, with wind-whipped waves and low visibility. it can be pretty difficult. anyone who has been on the ocean can attest to that. would you think that the colors would help and i heard that they dropped some flares so theres smoke or fire marking these objects. so it shouldnt be too difficult but then again, with the heavy seas,...

Youve been through scenarios like this, at what point do you think it turns into a cold case? do you feel confident were going to get an answer at all? >> thats always the hard part, when to suspend the search to tell the families youve done your best and have to give up. i sense a big will here to continue on. they really have to exhaust all possibilities. a normal search would go maybe three weeks and if nothing new came up, theyd tell them were really sorry, theres nothing more they can do. i...

Boots on the ground or guys on the boat, on the water. thats the only way. >> now comes an equally hard part, finding the point of impact. today u.s. navy sent this underwater microphone designed to listen for the ping of a black box and the flight data recorder. searchers will also bring in an under cover robot to scan the ocean floor for debris. its a drone that moves like a lawn mower up and down the ocean floor looking for metal. robot can only cover the area about the size of manhattan in a...

This heat masses where its red, the plane is probably in that location. where its green, its a medium chance. >> reporter: but managing the ocean surf zones have obstacles. why is it that aircraft can look at so many areas and then the ship cant find them? >> the item could have sunk, it could have been blown off on a different course or is someplace else and the ship may never find it again. >> reporter: a drift analysis map can help find the rest of the plane. data marker buoys on those maps h...

License plate. miles, you have to move things to the right places. a lot of our satellites are geosynchronous. >> the earth rotates beneath them. we only have a couple of -- windows are minimal on the location as the earth spins beneath them. there arent a lot of -- because theres not much there, theres not a lot of stuff that is permanently trained on the southern ocean. so thats part of the problem here. commercially available satellites, stuff you see from digital globe, are one meter resolut...

Were seven days old. that second image was 75 miles to the southwest of the first image. prevailing ocean currents would be putting it into the opposite direction. >> yes. >> is there any way that small ocean currents on the surface could have pulled the same piece of wreckage back to 75 miles away. looking at the same image. >> its a piece of matter, and one and waves have an effect on that. now what is it chapd like, mostly underwart, part of it above the water, catching the wind. all of it ha...

Easier part of this monumental search, because beyond that, the hurdles become extremely high. first, experts will use mathematical models of wind and ocean currents to see how far the debris drifted. when they agree on a general vicinity, sonar buoys can be dropped into the water to pick up pings from either the black boxes or the emergency locator transmitters, but the pings can only be detected from a mile away. and the batteries only last 30 days. that means they would send manned or unmanne...

>> my field is more ocean currents. the currents are there are somehow strong for the open ocean. very strong as you can experience in the gulf stream. but, you know, they can move debris like this amount over the course of several weeks. and what they can also do and something that happens everywhere in the worlds ocean is the octobers on the surface of floating debris, and that is certainly comp l lly complicati search mission. of course the forecast isnt good and hasnt been for several days. ...