In the most recent detailed map of the Indian Ocean sea floor, experts could find where the debris for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight are. These pictures are shared courtesy of The Daily Mail.
According to the Daily Mail, these pictures were created by two of the world’s leading ocean floor mapping experts, and they will aide the teams searching decide what type of underwater vehicles are needed to explore different areas. It will help find where the missing debris is as well, of course.
The above picture was created by Walter Smith and Karen Marks of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Laboratory for Satellite Altimetry in College Park, Maryland. It features ocean plateaus, ridges and any other large feature under the ocean.
This is exactly where search teams have been looking since the plane’s communication system went down on March 8.
The image was published today in the latest publication of Eos, the weekly newspaper of the Earth and Space sciences, published by the American Geophysical Union.
The new illustration, which is an area of 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 shows the two plateaus near where these ‘pings’ were heard, too.
It points out the deepest point in the area. An 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 can rise nearly three miles (five kilometres) above the deep seafloor, according to the map.
