Audio signal
Dr Usama Kadri at Cardiff University (UK) believes that hydrophone technology could help provide clues about where teams searching for MH370 should focus their efforts.
To find MH370, Dr Kadri focused on data from stations at Cape Leeuwin in Western Australia and Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean. Both stations are located about 10 minutes from the seventh arc of the Indian Ocean – the previous search area for MH370 – and both were active around the time MH370 is believed to have crashed.
Investigate the explosions
In the search for MH370, Dr. Kadri said, investigating the explosions could be helpful. He pointed out that the Argentine navy dropped grenades from the air at the last known location of the ARA San Juan submarine when it disappeared in 2017 and located the wreckage a year later.
Therefore, experts can conduct similar explosion experiments with MH370 along the seventh arc. “The basic idea is to release the same amount of energy that we believe MH370 produced,” he said.
However, explosions – especially controlled explosions – are expensive, require highly specialised equipment and are environmentally damaging, so this research method for the search for MH370 would likely need to be approved by the Malaysian government.
WSPR signal
At the University of Liverpool in the UK, Professor Simon Maskell is looking at another type of signal that could help track down MH70: WSPR signals. Professor Maskell is collaborating with MH370 search expert Richard Godfrey, a retired aerospace engineer, who believes that MH370 may have produced unusual signals in the WSPR data after the plane went missing.
Godfrey has identified 130 WSPR disturbances in the southern Indian Ocean that could be evidence of MH370's final flight path. The signals stop at a point just outside the seventh arc of the Indian Ocean, suggesting that previous teams searching for MH370 may not have searched far enough.
Natural solutions
Other MH370 searchers are pinning their hopes on barnacles clinging to MH370 debris that washed up on a beach in Saint-Denis on the island of Reunion in the western Indian Ocean in late July 2015.
Because ocean temperatures in the area where MH370 is believed to have disappeared can change rapidly, some researchers believe barnacles could help reveal the location of the plane's wreckage.
Scientists hope that determining the temperature recorded in the shells of the largest barnacles on the MH370 debris could help search teams pinpoint the exact location.
Resume the search
Ocean Infinity, a Texas-based marine robotics company, has announced its intention to resume the search for the missing plane. Ocean Infinity launched an independent search for MH370 in 2017 but to no avail.
“Finding MH370 and bringing some resolution to all the mysteries surrounding the disappearance of the aircraft has been at the forefront of our minds since we left the southern Indian Ocean in 2018,” said Ocean Infinity CEO Oliver Plunkett. “We are working with a range of experts to continue analysing the data in the hope of narrowing down the search area to one that is likely to be successful. We hope to return to the search soon.”
Ocean Infinity said it has spent the past few years developing advanced robotic technology to improve its ocean search capabilities. The search company has also submitted a proposal to the Malaysian government to reopen the search for MH370 on a no-find, no-fee basis.
