Map of Indian Ocean seafloor could be best chance of finding MH370
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The most detailed illustration yet of the seafloor in the Indian Ocean could reveal where the remains of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight are located.
Created by two of the world's leading ocean floor mapping experts, it will help the teams searching decide what type of underwater vehicles are needed to explore different areas.
And the technique might also reveal where debris from the crash lies.
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A new seafloor topography of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 search area has been released (pictured). Dashed lines approximate the search zone for sonar pings emitted by the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder popularly called black boxes. The first sonar contact (black circle) was made by a Chinese vessel
The illustration was created by Walter Smith and Karen Marks, both of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Laboratory for Satellite Altimetry in College Park, Maryland.
The seafloor topography map illustrates jagged plateaus, ridges and other underwater features of a large area underneath the Indian Ocean.
HOW ARE FLIGHTS TRACKED?
On board a plane there are cockpit voice and flight data recorders - the 'black boxes' - which each include a 'pinger' that sends a transmission up to 30 days after submersion underwater.
In the black box is an ADS-B flight transponder which, unlike the GPS in a car, broadcasts its location by sending information back to air traffic controllers every second.
Crews are also able to speak to their airline through discrete radio channels.
The cockpit voice recorders can additionally reveal conversations and other sounds to hint at problems that may have occurred during the flight.
This is where search efforts have focused since contact with Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 was lost on 8 March
The image was published today in Eos, the weekly newspaper of the Earth and Space sciences, published by the American Geophysical Union.
The new illustration of an area 2,000 by 1,400 kilometres (1,250 miles by 870 miles) where the plane might be shows locations on the seafloor corresponding to where acoustic signals from the airplane's black boxes were reportedly detected at the surface by two vessels in the area.
It also shows the two plateaus near where these 'pings' were heard.
It points out the deepest point in the area: five miles (7.9 kilometres) underneath the sea in the Wallaby-Zenith Fracture Zone - about as deep as 20 Empire State buildings stacked top to bottom.
Undersea mountains and plateaus rise nearly three miles (five kilometres) above the deep seafloor, according to the map.
Satellites can map the floor by observing the effects of gravity, as water on the surface dips and swells according to the topography of the sea bed. Satellite altimeters, which measure the distance from the satellite to the ocean surface, can measure the variations in the water that indicate what the topography is below
Boeing 777 Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 with the registration number 9M-MRO flies over Poland 5 February 2014 on a previous journey. The plane, with 239 people on board, dropped off air traffic control screens at about 1:30 a.m. on 8 March 2014, less than an hour into a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing
Satellite altimetry (measuring altitude) has made it possible to depict the topography of vast regions of the seafloor that would otherwise have remained unmapped, Smith said.
To illustrate the topography of the search area, Smith and Marks used publicly available data from various models and data banks, along with information culled from news reports.
Smith said the terrain and depths shown in the map could help searchers choose the appropriate underwater robotic vehicles they might use to look for the missing plane.
Knowing the roughness and shape of the ocean floor could also help inform models predicting where floating debris from the airplane might turn up.
But he cautions that the new illustration is not a roadmap to find the missing airplane - nor does the map define the official search area for the aircraft, he added.
'It is not "x marks the spot",' Smith says of their map.
'We are painting with a very, very broad brush.'
Search efforts for the missing airplane have focused on an area of the southern Indian Ocean west of Australia where officials suspect that the plane crashed after it veered off course.
After an initial air and underwater search failed to find any trace of the airplane, authorities announced this month that they will expand the search area and also map the seabed in the area.
The Phoenix team watches on as the Phoenix Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Artemis begins a search for MH370 on 17 April. 26 nations have been involved in the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 since it disappeared more than a month ago
Smith pointed out that the search for the missing plane is made more difficult because so little is understood about the seafloor in this part of the Indian Ocean.
In the southeast Indian Ocean, only five per cent of the ocean bottom has been measured by ships with echo soundings.
Knowledge of the rest of the area comes from satellite altimetry, which provides relatively low-resolution mapping compared to ship-borne methods.
'It is a very complex part of the world that is very poorly known,' Smith says.
He added that a lack of good data about Earth's seafloors not only hinders search efforts, it also makes it harder for scientists to accurately model the world's environment and climate.
Today, our knowledge of our planet's undersea topography is 'vastly poorer than our knowledge of the topographies of Earth's Moon, Mars and Venus,' Smith and Marks write in Eos.
This is because these other planetary bodies have no oceans, making their surfaces relatively easy to sense from space.
Smith further added that he hoped that 'the data collected during the search for MH370 will be contributed to public data banks and will be a start of greater efforts to map Earth's ocean floor.'
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