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Possible Depth of Malaysian Airlines Wreck

posted by janrinok on Wednesday April 09 2014, @10:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the that's-deep-man-deep dept.

It is tempting to think that once we locate the missing Malaysian Airlines MH370 aircraft the answers to what actually happened will surely follow. In the last 48-72 hours both the Chinese and Australians have detected possible 'pings' from the aircraft's data recorders. If it proves to be the missing aircraft, and that is still an 'if', then this offering from long-time member crutchy might help:

This graphic shows the problem that the recovery effort will have to overcome.

 
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Open4D on Thursday April 10 2014, @08:12AM

    by Open4D (371) on Thursday April 10 2014, @08:12AM (#29321) Journal

    http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-269567 98 [bbc.com]

    At the top of that article is a map of the ocean floor. But ...

    The thick bands indicate tracks surveyed by modern acoustic echosounders, which map a swath of area along the path of the ship, and these are very accurate (to about 2%).

    The thin tracks indicate older, low-tech echosoundings, which are not as reliable. They are, though, "direct" measurements.

    That cannot be said for everything else you see. This is mapping conducted by satellites that infer the shape of the ocean bottom from the shape of the water surface above.

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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by rts008 on Thursday April 10 2014, @09:02AM

    by rts008 (3001) on Thursday April 10 2014, @09:02AM (#29333)

    That is a far more interesting article than the link in the summary.

    I found this to be an interesting point:

    One estimate suggested it would take a ship, fitted with a modern swath-mapping echosounder system, about 200 years to map the entire ocean floor in high resolution.

    Put that another way: it would take 20 dedicated ships 10 years to do the same task. This could be achieved for about $3bn. It sounds a lot of money, but it's the kind of investment we make when we go to Saturn or Jupiter with a big orbiting spacecraft to map those planets and their moons.

    Hmm....food for thought...

    I think it could be done for less than $3bn.

    'Crowd Source' it(well, sort of...) by having interested nations/gov't.s/whatever fund/offer incentives(reduced tariffs or port fees or something like that) for that vessel to have the needed equipment installed to cover routes that would enable mapping of the entire global sea beds. Include military vessels that travel other routes, fishing vessels, etc.(think outside the box and 'traditional' methods!)
    Set up standards for data collection and processing, and crunch data ala 'seti at home', 'folding protein at home', etc.
    Add it to Google Earth/Maps and similar.

    Just some thoughts... *disclaimer: this is way out of my field, so I may be overlooking the obvious to those 'in the field'