KUALA LUMPUR, April 16 — An expert wreck hunter asserted that the detection of distinct signals that “can’t be from anything else” other than Flight MH370’s black boxes made the location of the wreckage all but certain to searchers.

David Mearns, director of Blue Water Recoveries, told Australian media yesterday that the authorities have enough information to say that they have found the wreck site.

“While the government hasn't announced that yet, if somebody asked me 'technically do they have enough information to say that?', my answer is unequivocally, yes.

“They have got four very, very good detections with the right spectrum of noise coming from them and it can't be from anything else,” he said, as quoted by the Sydney Morning Herald.

Mearns, an American, was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia for his work after he found the wreckage of HMAS Sydney in 2008, 66 years after it had been lost in the Indian Ocean during World War II.

He also helped find the wreckage of Air France flight 447 deep in the Atlantic Ocean in 2011.

The Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) has so far refrained from confirming the search area as the site of the missing plane.

But Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said last week that he was “very confident” that the signals were from the black boxes of MH370.

Search for the crucial flight data and cockpit voice recorders has now moved into the slower manual underwater search, after the batteries on the locators of the two black boxes are believed to have expired.

Up to 11 military aircraft, three civil aircraft and 11 ships will assist in the search today.

The centre of the search area lies approximately 2087 kilometres north-west of Perth in the Indian Ocean.

MH370 disappeared on March 8 while en route to Beijing. It was then carrying 239 people on board.