WELLINGTON, New Zealand – Two miles beneath the sea surface where satellites and planes are looking for debris from the missing Malaysian jet, the ocean floor is cold, dark, covered in a squishy muck of dead plankton and – in a potential break for the search – mostly flat. The troubling exception is a steep, rocky drop ending in a deep trench.
The seafloor in this swath of the Indian Ocean is dominated by a substantial underwater plateau known as Broken Ridge, where the geography would probably not hinder efforts to find the main body of the jet that disappeared with 239 people on board three weeks ago, according to seabed experts who have studied the area.
The search-area zone is huge: about 123,000 square miles, roughly the size of Poland or New Mexico. But it is closer to land than the previous search zone, its weather is much more hospitable – and Broken Ridge sounds a lot craggier than it really is.
And the deepest part is believed to be 19,000 feet, within the range of American black box ping locators on an Australian ship, which left Sunday for the area and is expected to arrive in three or four days.
Formed about 100 million years ago by volcanic activity, the ridge was once above water. Pulled under by the spreading of the ocean floor, now it is more like a large underwater plain, gently sloping from as shallow as about 2,625 feet to about 9,843 feet deep. It got its name because long ago, the movement of the Earth’s tectonic plates separated it from another plateau, which now sits about 1,550 miles to the southwest.
Much of Broken Ridge is covered in a sediment called foraminiferal ooze, made of plankton that died, settled and was compacted by the tremendous pressure from the water above. In places, the layer is up to a half a mile deep.
“Think like it’s been snowing there for tens of millions of years,” said William Sager, a professor of marine geophysics at the University of Houston in Texas.
Searchers will be hoping that if the latest area turns out to be where the plane crashed, but that remains educated guesswork until searchers can put their hands on aerial debris sightings and check what it is.
Searchers are hoping the fuselage did not go down on the southern edge of Broken Ridge. That’s where the ocean floor drops precipitously – more than 2½ miles in places, according to Robin Beaman, a marine geologist at Australia’s James Cook University. It’s not a sheer cliff, more like a very steep hill that a car would struggle to drive up. At the bottom of this escarpment is the narrow Diamantina trench, which measurements put as deep at 19,000 feet, though no one is sure of its greatest depth because it has never been precisely mapped.
