MH370 puzzle is unsolved, but helping unlock ocean mysteries
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DETAILED sea-floor maps made during the unsuccessful search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 released by Australia yesterday could help increase the knowledge of rich fisheries and the prehistoric movement of the earth’s southern continents.
The Indian Ocean search ended in January after covering a lonely stretch of open water where under-sea mountains larger than Mount Everest rise and a rift valley dotted with subsea volcanoes runs for hundreds of kilometers.
The whereabouts of the plane, which vanished in March, 2014, en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board, remains one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries.
But information gathered during painstaking surveys of about 120,000 square kilometers of the remote waters west in the Great Southern Ocean off Western Australia should provide fishermen, oceanographers and geologists unprecedented insight into the region, said Charitha Pattiaratchi, professor of coastal oceanography at the University of Western Australia.
“There are the locations of seamounts which will attract a lot of international deep sea fishermen to the area,” Pattiaratchi told reporters by phone.
High-priced fish such as tuna, toothfish, orange roughy, alfonsino and trevally are known to gather near the seamounts, where plankton swirl in the currents.
Pattiaratchi said the location of seamounts would also help model the impact of tsunamis, given undersea mountains help dissipate their destructive energy, and potentially change our understanding of the break-up of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana.
The data consists of three-dimensional models of undersea landforms as well as raw bathymetric survey information and drift analysis.
It was published online by Geoscience Australia on Wednesday, with a further tranche due to be published next year.
“To see this work come out of that tragedy that was MH370 is really quite astounding, they’ve taken it to a new level,” said Martin Exel, a commercial deep-sea fisherman at Austral Fisheries who has fished in the area.
“From a fishing perspective it would be valuable information — they’ve found whale bones and cables and a drum, it is incredible the resolution,” he said, referring to the data.
But the expense and difficulty of operating in such remote high seas made a rush to fill nets in the area unlikely, he said.
Stuart Minchin, chief of Geoscience Australia’s environmental geoscience division, said the remote search area was now among the most thoroughly mapped regions of the deep ocean on the planet.
“It is estimated that only 10 to 15 percent of the world’s oceans have been surveyed with the kind of technology used in the search for MH370,” Minchin said.
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