Expert Perspective

“Lepas don’t lie,” says Jim Carlton, one of the world’s leading experts in marine invertebrates. This week Andy and Jeff tried something we haven’t done before, incorporating an interview with a subject expert into our discussion of the MH370 evidence. In this case, Jim helps us try to understand how it could be that a piece of aircraft debris could float across the ocean in the way that Australian authorities assumed, with Lepas barnacles growing on a section that stuck up high into the air. (Spoiler alert: it couldn’t.) Jim also explains some other puzzling aspects of the debris. The upshot is that when we look at the marine growth on all the pieces of MH370 debris, it just doesn’t tell us the story we’d expect if the plane had crashed into the 7th arc search zone in March 2014. Once again, the closer we look at the evidence, the stranger the t ...