Imagine standing on a
mountain top and trying to spot a suitcase on the ground below. Then
imagine doing it in complete darkness.
That's basically what crews searching for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 have been trying to do for a month.
Thursday is Day 34 in the search for the plane that disappeared March 8, taking with it 239 passengers and crew members.
Officials believe the Boeing 777, while en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing, crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.
Pinning their hopes on
signals they think came from the plane's black boxes, they narrowed the
focus of their search Thursday to a 22,400-square-mile
(58,000-square-kilometer) area -- about 45 times the size of Los
Angeles.
But the real challenge is the depth of the water they're dealing with.
Staggering depths
The signals that were
detected Saturday, and again Tuesday, came from the ocean floor 15,000
feet below the surface. That's 2.8 miles (4.5 kilometers).
That's deeper than an
inverted Statue of Liberty (305 feet), deeper than an inverted Eiffel
Tower (1,063 feet), deeper even than an inverted Burj Khalifa, the
tallest building in the world (2,717 feet).
In fact, if you stacked
the Burj end-to-end five times, it would reach only 14,000 feet -- still
not deep enough to reach the spot searchers believe the pings are
coming from.
At these depths, marine life is unlike anything most people have ever seen.
"The deeper you go you
find less and less," marine biologist Paula Carlson said. "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."
Keep plunging
The pressure at nearly 15,000 feet is crushing -- so much so that very few manned submarines can withstand it.
"There are only about
half a dozen subs that can go to half the ocean depth with a number of
countries having that capability," said Sylvia Earle, an oceanographer
for National Geographic. "If it gets to the point of collapse, it
basically implodes, it just crushes."
Only a handful of people
have traveled to such staggering depths. One of them is movie director
James Cameron, who using a state-of-the-art vessel, dropped 35,000 feet, or about 7 miles, to the deepest place on Earth -- the Challenger Deep in the western Pacific Ocean.
A daunting task
Finding the plane is daunting. Bringing it back from the deep will be even more difficult.
"At these depths ...
there's no recovery like it," said Mary Schiavo, a former inspector
general for the U.S. Department of Transportation.
When the Titanic struck
an iceberg and sank in the Atlantic, it took some 70 years to discover
the wreckage. It was resting 12,500 feet below the ocean's surface, and
it still lies there today.
When Air France Flight
447, with 228 people on board, plunged into the South Atlantic Ocean
during a storm in 2009, the precise location of the wreckage remained a
mystery for almost two years.
Then the plane and its
dead were found in a mountain range 13,100-feet deep on the ocean floor.
Miniature submersible vehicles retrieved the Flight 447's voice and
flight data recorders.
Eventually 154 bodies were recovered. Seventy-four still rest in the watery grave.
Link to source: http://edition.cnn.com
No comments:
Post a Comment