Even if MH370 has been found, investigators face a daunting task in retrieving the black box

Based on the latest reports about missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, authorities in charge of the search efforts seem confident that they've narrowed down the stretch of the Indian Ocean where the airliner likely ended up. However, even if they pinpoint the exact location of the MH370's black box, actually getting it up to the surface is not going to be an easy task.

The daunting fact of the matter is that this region of the ocean floor is apparently over 4,500 metres beneath the water's surface. To put that into perspective, all but the top ten of Canada's tallest mountains (by elevation) would be completely submerged under that depth of water. Even if you attached eight CN Towers to each other, bases to broadcast antennas, you'd still fall short of reaching the sea floor by almost 150 metres (the height of Commerce Court North!).

There are, apparently, a few things working in their favour, though. When Air France flight 447 went down in 2009, it ended up at a depth of 3,900 metres below the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, in a region of the ocean floor that was part of the mid-Atlantic ridge.

"That was a very young sea floor — it was very difficult to image that wreckage using sonar systems because of the rough topography and lack of sediment cover," said Prof. Ian Wright, of the UK's National Oceanographic Centre according to The Guardian.

It took over three years for authorities to find Air France flight 447 on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, retrieve its black box and conclude the investigation into the crash. Since this region of the Indian Ocean is very old ocean floor, with plenty of sediment cover, that means it should be far easier for sonar signals to differentiate between the soft sediment and the harder materials of the airliner.

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So far, efforts to pick up the pings from MH370's black box have registered a number of detections, but the investigators are also confident that they're hearing the signals start to fade. If the batteries in the black box give out before they locate it, it will add yet another complication to the search, as even with narrowing down the search area, it would still apparently take around six years for technologies like the Bluefin-21 robot submersible to scour that much of the ocean floor.

Hopefully, investigators are on the right track here and the black box batteries hold out, so it won't take that long for the mystery of Malaysian Airlines flight 370 to be solved.

(Photo courtesy: The Canadian Press, Reuters)

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