KUALA LUMPUR, June 4 — Australia-based scientists say they are planning to divulge information today on a mysterious underwater noise detected off southern India that may be linked to the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
US’ International Business Times reported last Monday that the low-frequency sound, which was recorded by two undersea receivers in the Indian Ocean at the time that the Boeing 777 jet stopped satellite transmissions and disappeared on March 8, appeared to have travelled halfway across the ocean and was picked up by receivers off the coast of Perth.
“It’s not even really a thump sort of a sound — it’s more of a dull oomph,” Alec Duncan, a senior marine science research fellow at Curtin University near Perth, who has led the research, was quoted as saying by the New York Times.
“If you ask me what’s the probability this is related to the flight, without the satellite data it’s 25 or 30 per cent, but that’s certainly worth taking a very close look at,” he added.
UK newspaper The Telegraph, however, pointed out that the original location of the mysterious sound — some 3,000 miles northwest of Australia — was inconsistent with the present search area off the Australian coast that is based on analysis of satellite data by UK-based satellite communications firm Inmarsat.
The New York Times quoted Duncan as saying that there were other possible explanations for the underwater noise besides an aircraft impact, such as a tiny undersea earthquake that could produce a similar noise audible across vast distances, but too weak to register on the nearest seismometers on land, which did not record a tremor at the time.
The US newspaper reported that the two receivers — one operated by Duncan’s team and the other by the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organisation in Vienna — have established the direction in which the sound was travelling, but not the distance it travelled, leaving a possible search area of several hundred kilometres wide and a couple of thousand kilometres long, which would be an area roughly the size of Texas.
Mark Prior, an acoustics expert at the Vienna test ban organisation headquarters — was reported by New York Times as saying that the sound could be consistent with an ocean impact, or with a sealed, air-filled container sinking till it crumpled due to water pressure.
Australia’s search authorities said last week that no wreckage has been found in a targeted zone in the southern Indian Ocean — which was based on sounds believed to have been coming from the plane’s black box locator beacon — and will now move to a 12-month hunt across a vast stretch of the Indian Ocean.
The Telegraph reported that the next phase — which will include private contractors — will start in August and cover more than 23,000 square miles.
The uncertainty over Flight MH370’s final location has been further complicated by a British woman, who was sailing across the Indian Ocean from India to Thailand with her husband, claiming that she could have seen the jetliner on fire on March 8.
Katherine Tee, who was on night watch on March 7-8, told Thailand’s Phuket Gazette last Monday that she and her spouse recently checked their GPS logs and found they were on the commercial plane’s projected flight path.
The plane carrying 239 people on board vanished from civilian radar in the early hours of March 8 and mysteriously veered from its Beijing-bound destination shortly after leaving Kuala Lumpur, and flew in the opposite direction towards the vast Indian Ocean.
