Ocean Microphones May Have Recorded Lost Malaysian Jet's Crash … Thousands of Miles from Search Sites
Nearly five years ago, the doomed Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished without a trace, with 239 people on board. The search in the Indian Ocean for the wreckage of the aircraft has been the largest and most expensive search effort in history — but it has turned up nothing.
Now, a team of researchers says Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 may have crashed thousands of miles from the search locations, based on sounds recorded in the ocean near the time the passenger jet disappeared on March 8, 2014.
In research published Jan. 29 in the open-access journal Scientific Reports, applied mathematician Usama Kadri said underwater microphones in the Indian Ocean had recorded four distinctive sound events, caused by very low-frequency acoustic-gravity waves, around the time that Flight 370 could have crashed into the sea.
His research showed that one of those sound events happened relatively close to the search area — but two others are thousands of miles away, in the northern part of the Indian Ocean, somewhere between Madagascar and the atoll of Diego Garcia in the Chagos Archipelago, Kadri told Live Science. ...
Kadri and colleagues at the University of Cardiff in the U.K. and Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada analyzed sounds recorded by a network of underwater microphones (called hydrophones), which are maintained by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) to listen for banned nuclear tests.
The CTBTO hydrophones give directional bearings, loudness and frequencies of sounds in the ocean, from which scientists can calculate an approximate location for where those sounds originated. ...
As well as two matching sound events recorded by the CTBTO hydrophones at Cape Leeuwin in Western Australia, the researchers found two sound events recorded by the hydrophones at Diego Garcia that could match the sounds of an airliner hitting the ocean.
Their directional bearings and timings indicated that they both occurred somewhere northwest of Madagascar — thousands of miles from the areas where searchers have looked for wreckage of the aircraft.
But the ocean is a noisy place, and Kadri said the underwater sounds might have also been caused by underwater earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, or even by meteorites or space junk falling in the ocean. ...
However, they were also valid sound signals that could have been created by the crash of Flight 370, he said.
Kadri said he recognized that the sound events near Madagascar were thousands of miles from the so-called "7th arc" — the line of possible positions of Flight 370 calculated from the aircraft's final radio signals to a tracking satellite shortly before it would have run out of fuel. ...
But Kadri said the positions suggested by the satellite radio data might be inaccurate, or calculated incorrectly, or otherwise misleading. ...
Details of the new research had been relayed to the Malaysian and Australian authorities responsible for locating the aircraft, but there are currently no plans to resume the search at sea, Kadri said.
Other experts on the search for the crash site of Flight 370 gave divided opinions about the new research.
David Griffin, an oceanographer at the Australian government's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), told Live Science that he could think of no reason why the 7th-arc satellite data should be disregarded.
Griffin also estimated that crash sites near Madagascar and Diego Garcia would result in floating debris along the East African coast within a few months — in other words, by mid-2014.
But no floating debris from the crash was found there until late 2015 and 2016, around 18 months later, he said.
However, oceanographer David Gallo, the director of special projects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, said he was not convinced that the satellite data represented by the 7th arc gave an accurate indication of the final positions of Flight 370.
Gallo ... said the Australian-led searches for Flight 370 had relied on the 7th-arc data because they needed to respond quickly.
But "I'm not now nor ever was a fan of the 7th arc," Gallo told Live Science in an email: "[The] plane could very well have crashed north of Madagascar."