than that. they picked some of these up for hours and hours and hours. what else would they have been? well, you know, now the navy is explaining it might have been some frequencies from the ship, from the towed pinger locator itself. i m still skeptical about trackers on marine life. but they re saying from the very equipment itself could have caused these pings. and many of us were asking all along is someone checking what happens to a pinger underwater for 30 days. we have now had three months. they could have checked it twice. does a 37.7 kilohertz pinger degrade under water pressure to 33.3? and now apparently we ll never know that because these weren t the pingers anyway. but that would have been a very important question to answer, particularly now that they say it s universally accepted, interesting term by the navy, universally accepted by the search teams that these were not it. richard, how do you go from publicly saying we re basically sure these are it and we re lookin
normally youbigger area and zoom in and now we start with a small search and zooming out. this whole search has been unorthodox. as i said before, you start with debris on the surface and you narrow it down and listen for pingers and bring in bluefin that s a very precise instrument. now as you say we re back to the big area. they are abandoning pings they put so much hope on. the australian prime minister said they were confident this was the black box. they are in the broad area but just expanding beyond the strongest ping. they are going way beyond the pings. remember, since they searched the area around the best ping and didn t find anything within that detection radius, that means that something else caused that ping. the frequency was always dodgy. 33.3 instead of 37.5 and that is
the probability it s there. you re just reducing it closer to zero. and the fact in the ocean, it s different from land, where if something lands on a forest or in a field it will stay there unless somebody moves it. the ocean, you ve got currents moving things around, stuff could resurface that had sunk before. this is a great question. how do we know that it s not in some patch of ocean that wasn t previously? also. again, these questions are for the families. can the detected frequency of 33.3 correspond to the pinger locator attached to the black boxes? it s a different frequency than the ones we know that the black boxes sent out but can it correspond? well, this is a great question. and this really boils down to the heart of what we re doing right now looking on the bottom of the ocean of the bluefin-21. we were told that the pinger locater box was going to be at 37.5. and yet when the signal was obtained it was 33.3. does that rule it out? some experts say no, that, in fact,
again is the only way to pinpoint its location. the ocean shield moves about two miles an hour tracking the picking. multiple hits are crucial in triangulating a massive search area. until we detect a ping, we will not deploy the submersible. is that clear? unless we get another transmission. reporter: this is the submersible, bluefin-21, the under-water drone moves along at a very slow pace, mapping the ocean floor. the pinger manufacturer is analyzing the recording. it is actually at 33.3 kilohertz, a lower frequency than the standard .5, a change due possibly to environmental factors. there is a change with the pressure on the ocean floor. and the age of the particular
the salinity and the surface temperature. you might get a difference in temperature between a lower layer and an upper layer and a difference in salinity, in density. and this would affect the path of sound waves. and so the two ping signals could very well be coming from a signal source. and with all the errors adding up, they seem to be very far apart. but if you re going to look some place, this is sure a very good start. yeah. jeff, we are learning tonight that the pings detected by the ocean shield, as bill nye was just referencing, were actually at 33.3, where he said you may get a different temperature, right? a lower standard than the standard beacon frequency of 37.5 kilohertz. that s according to the pinger manufacturer. do you think this could still be the black boxes in your estimation, even at these different temperatures or different rates? there s a lot of problems with this pinger data. the 33.3 megahertz frequency, that s a big problem.