MH370 Malaysian Airlines Mystery: How Difficult is the Search Underwater?
The pings from flight MH370 Malaysian Airlines are coming from 15,000 feet below the surface and that is deeper than inverted Burj Khalifa or Eifel Tower. According to officials, the Boeing 777 flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean. The search for MH370 is still on, but it is quite difficult to look for the plane in the ocean floor.
According to a report on CNN, officials have narrowed their search on Thursday to 22,400 square miles after they received signals from MH370's black box. The area is approximately 45 times the size of L.A.
On Saturday and again on Tuesday, signals were detected from sonar buoys. 15,000 feet or 2.8 miles and it is deeper than Burj Khalifa, Eifel Tower or Statue of Liberty, for that matter.
Experts believe that marine life at such depths is unthinkable.
"The deeper you go you find less and less," said marine biologist Paula Carlson.
"They have to be very cold tolerant, they might not even have eyes. They may be blind, because they don't need to see, there's no light down there."
At 15,000 feet, the pressure is crushing and only a few submarines can take on that pressure.
Sylvia Earle, an oceanographer for National Geographic mentioned that only half a dozen submarines can manage to go half the ocean depth. Sylvia stated that beyond a point, the submarines just implode.
Finding MH370 Malaysian Airlines
It is a herculean task to find the plane and more than that it is next to impossible to bring it back to the surface.
CNN notes that it took 70 years just to discover the Titanic wreckage as it was some 12,500 feet below the surface and is still there.
On Thursday afternoon, an Australian Navy P-3 Orion aircraft picked signals of MH370's black box from the same area where pings were heard on Saturday, reported by Sky News.