Mammoth task to find an object 4,500m deep, much less recover it, reports CNN
Underwater pulses detected last Saturday and Tuesday were believed to have come from the ocean floor 4,500m below the surface of the Indian Ocean, CNN reported today.
In perspective, an inverted Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, stacked end to end five times would only reach 4,260m.
That was still not deep enough to reach the spot searchers believed the pings were coming from, CNN reported.
As the search and rescue operations for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 enters the 34th day, CNN has put into perspective the difficulty of searchers in finding a plane the bottom of the ocean.
"Imagine standing on a mountain top and trying to spot a suitcase on the ground below, then imagine doing it in complete darkness," it said.
"This is basically what search and rescue crews searching for MH370 have been trying to do for the past month."
Flight MH370 was carrying 12 crew members and 227 passengers when it dropped off the radar at 1.20am on March 8.
Malaysian officials, based on information provided by British satellite company Inmarsat and the UK's Air Accidents Investigations Branch, believe MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean.
Searchers have narrowed the focus on their operations to a 58,000-square-kilometre radius, or about 45 times the size of Los Angeles.
The search area has been narrowed as rescuers pinned their hopes on signals which are believed to have come from MH370's flight recorders.
However, CNN said the real challenge was the depth of the water which searchers were dealing with.
"Fifteen thousand feet is 4.5km. How deep is that depth? It is deeper than an inverted Status of Liberty (93m), deeper than an inverted Eiffel Tower (324m)," CNN said adding that an inverted Burj Khalifa was only 828m.
Marine biologist Paula Carlson told CNN marine life at 4,500m was unlike anything most people have ever seen.
"The deeper you go, you find less and less. They have to be very cold tolerant," Carlson said.
"They might not even have eyes, they may be blind. There is no light down there so they do not need to see," she added.
Moreover, the pressure at 4,500m was crushing, CNN reported, so much so that few manned submarines could withstand it.
"There are only a handful of 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," Earle told CNN.
CNN reported that only a handful of people have travelled to such staggering depths.
One of them was movie director James Cameron, using a state-of-the-art vessel, dropped 10,600m, to the deepest place on Earth, the Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean.
When the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank in the Atlantic, it took some 70 years to discover the wreckage. It was resting 3,800m below the ocean's surface, and it still lies there today.
When Air France flight 447, with 228 people on board, plunged into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, the wreckage remained a mystery for almost two years.
Then the plane and its dead were found in a mountain range almost 4,000m 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. – April 11, 2014.
