Oceanographer: Flight 370 could be north of search area

CANBERRA, Australia -- The oceanographer whose calculations helped an American adventurer find potential debris from Flight 370 said Thursday the Malaysia Airlines jetliner could have crashed slightly north of the current search area.

Adventurer Blaine Gibson has handed Malaysian authorities three pieces of debris and personal belongings he found on Madagascar beaches, which he suspects came from the Boeing 777 that vanished March 8, 2014.

Western Australia University oceanographer Charitha Pattiaratchi said the same drift modeling Gibson relied on while looking for Flight 370 debris led his team of oceanographers to suspect the plane 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 could not rule out the aircraft being within the 46,000 square miles of seabed being searched southwest of Australia.

Despite the drift modeling and other predictions officials have made about the plane's possible flight path, no one has been able to explain what has become one of aviation's biggest mysteries.

Officials from Malaysia, China and Australia will meet in Kuala Lumpur today to discuss the future of the underwater search, with fewer than 3,900 square miles still to be scanned by ships towing sonar equipment.

The search of the seabed has not yielded a single clue.