KUALA LUMPUR, August 1 — The search for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 will resume soon after a two-month pause but investigators said the uncharted waters of the southern Indian Ocean, where the plane is believed to have ended, pose a bigger challenge than exploring the moon, Mars and Venus.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) is expected to recruit a deepsea specialist firm to explore the area within a few weeks before the multimillion ringgit hunt is rebooted, Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported today.
At least eight such firms are bidding to join the search where they can choose to work alone or move as one consortium, the US daily reported, citing sources.
The bidders include a Dutch oil and gas consulting firm, a Houston-based oil services company that helped find the Titanic in 1985 and even treasure hunters whose sole business is exploring the deep.
“One is Odyssey Marine Explorations Inc, a Florida firm listed on the Nasdaq that a few years ago recovered around US$500 million (RM1.6 billion) from a Spanish ship sunk off Portugal in 1804,” the WSJ wrote.
Despite the specialised recruitment to aid the hunt, WSJ in its report cautioned that the search could take years as the Indian Ocean was one of the last frontiers of the undersea world.
The report pointed out that surveys of Mars and Venus are considered 250 times more accurate than the current maps of the search zone for MH370, an area so clean of bacteria and life that scientists say a whale carcass could take decades to decompose.
“There, the contours of the ocean floor have only been approximated by bouncing satellite radar off the surface of the sea, or by taking low-resolution sonar soundings from boats that passed through the area a generation ago.
“Research indicates the presence of dramatic vistas, including a volcanic plateau and mountains roughly the height of the Swiss Alps,” the report said.
Adding to the already arduous search is the lack of a single shred of hard evidence to prove the Boeing 777 jetliner had gone down in that particular part of the world shortly after it left Malaysian shores in the early morning of March 8.
All the searchers have been relying on are the flight’s radar tracks and cryptic electronic conversations between the aircraft and satellite communications firms, which indicated that MH370 mysteriously diverted off its planned flight path from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing towards an area more than a thousand miles southwest of the coast of Perth in Australia.
But nearly five months have passed since the jetliner’s disappearance. Its black boxes have long run out of batteries and months of searching have returned zero results.
The black boxes — the flight’s crucial data recorders — were believed to have transmitted signals to ships scouring the ocean surface in the early days of MH370’s disappearance.
But apart from these pulses, nothing conclusive has turned up.
The WSJ noted that when a plane strikes water, it typically comes apart. The engines and its turbines will sink to the bottom while much of the rest of the aircraft would disintegrate.
On a flat ocean floor, pieces of the plane should send back strong images to a sonar device. But beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean lies a massive undersea volcanic mountain range and ravines, which would trap such plane debris, hampering a sonar search.
According to a Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) report on March 26, the aircraft could have crashed near the active zone of the Southeast Indian Ridge, if it did enter the southern Indian Ocean at all.
The ridge, according to the article, is a chain of underwater volcanoes running from southwest of Australia to below New Zealand. It separates the Indo-Australian Plate to the north from the Antarctic Plate to the south.
“With Flight 370, investigators don’t have the benefit of debris or precise final coordinates to give them a starting point.
“Moreover, the patch of sea they have identified as the plane’s most likely resting place is one of the least-understood places in the world, 1,100 miles (1,770.2km) off Western Australia,” the WSJ wrote.
To date, the only sonar surveys of the underwater topography were taken by boats passing through the area way back in the 1960s and 1970s, the paper wrote.
The paper reported that the authorities are conducting additional mapping of the area with three sonar survey ships, including one contracted from Fugro NV, the Dutch firm bidding to participate in the search.
“But their equipment operates from the surface, and the images are unlikely to be sharp enough to spot plane debris, instead revealing the lay of the land for the next group of searchers being brought in under the fresh tender.
“To find the plane, those searchers will have to use undersea sonar equipment, including side-scan sonars, that can be sent to within 150 feet (45.7 metres) of the seabed,” WSJ wrote.
The paper said the panel perusing the tender bids for the searches have the tough task of having to pick wisely as “a wrong choice could reduce the search’s odds of success”.
“Among the hardest: whether to bet heavily on companies like Williamson & Associates, which specialises in using relatively simple towed sonars, or outfits like Woods Hole that have their own higher-tech autonomous underwater vehicles, or AUVs,” it wrote.
It said towed sonars can cover large areas quickly but could be hard to manipulate.
“Searching for the AHS Centaur, a World War II-era hospital ship, in 2009, scientists had to tow a sonar device with more than 4 miles of cable through a ravine 295 feet wide.
“They likened it to the movie ‘Star Wars’, when fighters flew through a narrow trench at high speeds to unload a final shot to destroy the fictional Death Star. One device snapped off its cable and was lost,” WSJ reported.
The AUVs, on the other hand, can be programmed to navigate through the uneven terrain where MH370 is believed to be.
“But AUVs cover less ground because their batteries can’t power energy-intensive sonars, and they cannot be operated in rough seas as they have to be hauled back on deck each day, placing a ship’s crew at risk,” the paper said.
All things considered, the search ahead remains an arduous one.
The world is now relying on the sophistication of modern-day technology which, thanks to offshore research by oil and gas companies and militaries, have ventured to deeper depths than previously thought possible.
“It used to be that when a ship sank in the deep sea, we would commit the ship and souls for eternity to the deep — gone forever,” David Gallo, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution special projects director, was quoted saying in WSJ.
Woods Hole is the research firm that helped find Air France Flight 447.
But, Gallo added, “that’s not true anymore”.
