The search for the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 plane could get a little easier soon once a project to produce a more detailed map of the seafloor west of Australia is finished.
The missing plane left Kuala Lumpur International Airport back on March 8 heading to Beijing. It is believed to have crashed in the southeast Indian Ocean after running out of fuel and veering off course.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau said in a May 26 statement that Ocean floor mapping is currently underway, though it could take months to complete.
No conclusive signs of debris have turned up during surface searches, according to Live Science.
In comparison, the surface of Mars is currently better mapped out than the details of the seafloor in the suspected crash region, according to a report published in Eos today (May 27).
Two ocean mapping experts with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said that depth measurements by ship cover just 5 percent of the ocean region.
"It is a very complex part of the world that is very poorly known," report co-author Walter Smith said in a statement.
Smith and co-author Karen Marks were able to make a more precise map of the search area by using satellite altimetry data, according to Live Science.
A model of the topography of the seafloor has been provided thanks to satellite measurements of small bumps and dips in the ocean surface.
The data is available to the public from to the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, or GEBCO.
The new map could be used to help searchers forecast the path of floating debris and then figure out what kind of technology to use when searching the ocean depths.
The map shows that the region's deepest point is approximately 4.9 miles below the ocean surface, according to Live Science. The unmanned Bluefin-21 sub currently searching the seafloor has a depth limit of 2.8 miles.
"The new seafloor topography covers an area of 1,243 miles by 870 miles (2,000 km by 1,400 km), the region where searchers detected what could be acoustic signals from the airplane's black boxes," according to Live Science.
Chinese survey ship, Zhu Kezhen, is also mapping the ocean floor in this region.
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