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Ocean Microphones May Have Recorded Lost Malaysian Jet's Crash

89 points| sagitariusrex | 7 years ago |livescience.com

40 comments

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ximeng|7 years ago

http://mh370.radiantphysics.com/2018/11/17/ocean-infinity-fi...

“Unfortunately, the acoustics generated by the impact of MH370 on the ocean surface would not propagate along the “deep sound channel” (DSC) the way an underwater acoustic event does, so the impact likely was not detected by CTBTO sensors.” - suggests this is unlikely, although not detailed explanation

djsumdog|7 years ago

They probably don't have the money or influence to get a search crew out there and are hoping this report will encourage some other treasure hunting group to check it out and confirm/reject their theory.

blakesterz|7 years ago

"But just how long the Boeing 777 jet could have stayed airborne would depend on its actual flight path, its altitude and how many of its four engines were operating."

Don't the 777s have 2 engines?

jimueller|7 years ago

Yeah, that jumped out at me too. I don't know how you get that fact wrong.

lstodd|7 years ago

3 including the APU

mansr|7 years ago

Yes, they do.

markoman|7 years ago

I'm surprised that no mention was made of the U.S. Navy's network of hydrophones (SOSUS) and whatever took its place in the late 1990s. SOSUS was quite successful at detecting a number of Russian submarines since the 1950s with every new generation thereof. In any event, I can only imagine that there would be U.S. government resources (military and otherwise) that could have provided some surveillance information on what happened to the Malaysian 777 airliner.

spectramax|7 years ago

I wonder how much information, if any, is withheld by military organizations in various countries. I presume a particular country doesn’t want to give away their latest radar capabilities or what have you by disclosing tracking information whether it’s through satellite systems or through sub-ocean sonar.

rtkwe|7 years ago

SOSUS (according to the public maps) is very focused on the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and a lot around Russian territorial waters. The network is probably a bit denser than represented on the map but there's not much need for it in the Indian Ocean.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/Sosus_ma...

Spooky23|7 years ago

Part of the problem is the area is like the ultimate backwater.

fromthestart|7 years ago

>But the ocean is a noisy place, and Kadri said the underwater sounds might have also been caused by underwater earthquakes...

Seismic is rough. Even large earthquake events are localized with large error because of constant noise - seismic event arrivals are hard to pinpoint precisely in time. On top of that, once we have arrival times from a bunch of seismometers(microphones) localization is an inversion problem, dependent on velocity models for a rather heterogeneous earth which further reduces location precision. Even worse, I doubt a crashing jet produces a large magnitude (loud) seismic event, so picking out its arrival in noisy mic data is even harder than it can be for shallow earthquakes.

I'd guess a radius on the order of thousands of miles at best, but it's all contingent on how loud the event was and how noisy the mics that picked it up are.

edmundsauto|7 years ago

For the curious, & because I did the math for myself:

1k mile radius is 3.14 million square miles. The oceans are 140 million square miles.

Neil44|7 years ago

How frequent are these gravity events during a time period when an airliner isn’t crashing?

GrumpyNl|7 years ago

With all those satellites in the air, they should able to trace it.