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Transportation

Australian Exploration Company Believes It May Have Found MH370 Wreckage 293

First time accepted submitter NapalmV (1934294) writes "Using technology designed to find nuclear warheads and submarines, an Adelaide-based exploration company believes it may have located the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. 'The company, GeoResonance, says its research has identified elements on the ocean floor consistent with material from a plane. Six weeks have now passed since the plane disappeared and extensive searches in the Indian Ocean have failed to locate any wreckage.'"
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Australian Exploration Company Believes It May Have Found MH370 Wreckage

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  • by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Monday April 28, 2014 @11:51AM (#46860463)
    that I simply don't care anymore? After weeks of CNN jumping at every bit of trash in the ocean, I simply do not care about this plane anymore. Toss a couple wreaths into the water and call it done.
    • by magsol ( 1406749 ) on Monday April 28, 2014 @11:52AM (#46860475) Journal
      I didn't stop caring; I just stopped watching CNN.

      Truthfully, I stopped watching CNN years ago.
      • by sconeu ( 64226 ) on Monday April 28, 2014 @11:57AM (#46860521) Homepage Journal

        CNN's heyday was the First Gulf War. After that, it was all downhill.

      • by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 28, 2014 @12:16PM (#46860751)

        There is not a good left-leaning news channel out there. The American stations are all still too capitalist. BBC rocks, but in the US, the market is limited. My own carrier refuses to carry it -- likely because they get paid not to. RT is nice, but is too Russia-centric. Also, the American news channels are nothing but spin. I want nothing but news. I don't want what YOU think happened. the BBC does such a great job. I'm saddened I cannot get their TV channel.

        • by jimminy_cricket ( 139648 ) on Monday April 28, 2014 @12:31PM (#46860919)

          Are not the sentences "There is not a good left-leaning news channel out there." and "Also, the American news channels are nothing but spin. I want nothing but news." in direct contradiction? Is not the very definition of "left-leaning" (or "right-leaning") equal to "spin"? If you desire spin-free news, you cannot also desire that it lean to the left (or right, or any other direction).

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward

            Not true, really. By spin, I mean how Fox attacks Obama incessantly rather than report. How MSNBC attacks the right for being right. I'm not a liberal. I'm a leftist. I don't want left spin. I want the news reported for left-leaning people on left ideas, left happenings, left progress, that sort of thing. India has this type of news, for example.

            • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

              by dreamchaser ( 49529 )

              Then you want news with a left spin. That's exactly what you describe.

              • While I agree that it would be best for everyone to get unbiased news across the political spectrum, there is a difference between leftist (or rightist) "news" and "spin".

                To me, "spin" implies falsehood, or at least heavily biased reporting. On the other hand, it would be possible do completely unbiased reporting of news that is of interest to those on the left (or right).

              • by AK Marc ( 707885 )
                No, you are meaning "spin" to mean viewpoint. He means left-leaning to mean issues important to left-leaning people, not "spun" in any direction. He seems quite clear on that point, and insistence on arguing makes the arguer look dumb for not understanding.
            • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

              by Bartles ( 1198017 )

              I'm not a liberal. I'm a leftist.

              Finally, someone gets it and is now willing to admit it. You do realize that leftism requires a strong element of propaganda? You should just read Pravda and never go anywhere else.

              • by sjames ( 1099 )

                It does not require propaganda any more than any other political orientation. You're just accustomed to the U.S. propaganda.

            • im surprised, With what you are asking for, MSNBC would be great. but like you pointed out, MSNBC doesnt have any real ideas, all they ever do is watch fox, who has about 100X the viewers, and make fun of them and talk about how bad fox is. MSNBC news programing (which of the 3 majors actually has the least "news" programming) is actually pretty good. Fox "news" programming is also very good. CNN dropped the ball years ago and never found it
            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by Anonymous Coward

              Try NPR.

          • by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Monday April 28, 2014 @03:55PM (#46862953)

            If you desire spin-free news

            Then you better go places and see for yourself. You can't get spin-free news on electronic media. Quantum physics 101!

          • by rbrander ( 73222 )

            That's not consistent with the statement (not one you made; your post is internally consistent) that "America is a center-right nation" - a statement that gets broad agreement from all news outlets, I think. Certainly Fox reminds its viewers of that fact (or claim) whenever the R party has a bad day at the polls, and you can find the sentiment in CNN and MSNBC reportage (and many papers) as well.

            If America is a "centre-right nation" - certainly it has a Gini number (measure of inequality) out of step with

        • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

          What's nice about the Kremlin propaganda channel RT? I find it totally useless since it's Putin's version of Fox News.
        • by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 28, 2014 @12:46PM (#46861077)

          There is not a good left-leaning news channel out there. The American stations are all still too capitalist. BBC rocks

          I love this. I know the way it's written doesn't necessarily imply that the author believes the BBC is left-leaning, but it does come across that way. From your side of the pond I guess it probably is left-leaning by comparison to the range of news media you have available; the BBC charter, however, requires it to be politically independent, and it is monitored by OFWATCH to ensure neutrality.

        • by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

          "There is not a good left-leaning news channel out there"
          you are correct.
          You also can not have a good right-leaning news channel.

          Are you looking for news or propaganda you like?

          Honestly try VOA. It seems to work the hardest to not be right or left leaning.

          • by AK Marc ( 707885 )
            You don't understand the difference between "leaning" and "biased". A left-leaning news channel might have more coverage of electric cars and windmills, but unbiased reporting of each. You don't need a "spin" or bias to better address some ideology. You just get more stories they are interested in.

            I want an unbiased horse-leaning channel. Horse have issues too. That doesn't mean it has to have some pro-horse agenda and spin, but that the coverage is things interesting to horses and fans of horses, wha
    • by CanHasDIY ( 1672858 ) on Monday April 28, 2014 @11:57AM (#46860531) Homepage Journal

      that I simply don't care anymore?

      Nah; heck, if not for the curiosity factor (loss of communications, stories about the 'weird' pilot, et. al), most people wouldn't have paid any more attention to it than any other plane crash.

      If anything, that just shows that you don't have a vested interest in the search, just like 6.999 billion other humans.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by lbmouse ( 473316 )

      I agree. A few of them will find their way off the island anyways.

    • After weeks of CNN jumping at every bit of trash in the ocean, I simply do not care

      Yes, the degree to which one TV show has either increased or decreased your concern on the matter, that is an issue you need to work on. It should be entirely irrelevant.

      I plug '370' into Google News every few days and read a brief article on what's new. I'm interested to hear what happened, but systems failures are something of an esoteric interest of mine. I haven't had cable or satellite for years and the CNN live str

    • Compassion Fatigue (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compassion_fatigue) is a very real thing. With saturation media coverage of almost any event, it's very easy to become somewhat jaded about events in the world.

      It doesn't make you a bad person; but recognizing what you are feeling and not taking steps to stop this from happening again (eg. by switching off the 24/7 news and going to play a game with your dog outside in the sun) does mark you as a bit of a tragic. We all know the types who live for the next

      • by meta-monkey ( 321000 ) on Monday April 28, 2014 @01:37PM (#46861587) Journal

        What bothers me most about the saturation of mass tragedy coverage is how the media makes it seem as if such events are threatening to repeat themselves everywhere. This happens every time there's a school shooting. "Are your children safe?!? Tune it to find out how horribly your children may die AT ANY TIME!" When the fact is, your children are not in danger. If you do the math, there are almost 100,000 public schools in the US. There's an average of about 2 incidents of somebody firing a gun at a K-12 school each year. The average school year is 180 days. That means that 18,999,998 school days each year, the bell will ring in the morning, the bell will ring in the afternoon with not a shot fired. On two terrible, terrible days, a shooting occurs. It's awful. A terrible tragedy. But it's so incredibly, incredibly rare that there's basically nothing that can be done to stop it. Banning guns, arming teachers, mental health screening, whatever, is not going to stop 1-in-9-million events. And yet the "debate" will rage in the media for weeks until the next tragedy strikes.

        It's exhausting.

  • jim stone (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 28, 2014 @11:54AM (#46860493)

    There is absolutely no doubt that flight 370 was electronically hijacked and flown through the Maldives and on to Diego Garcia. There is also no doubt that there was a plan to use at least the image of flight 370 to crash the nuclear summit in Belgium and blame it on Iran, and that the Dutch intercepted the crash craft before it arrived. This report is documented accurate. There will be a lot here, briefly discussed that you have not seen before. If you were looking for a concise report that will give a clear picture, this sums it all up.

  • What about the pings they received near the current search area? It was said to be consistent with that of a black box. With all the contradictory news around, I don't think I can believe this until they have proof for sure.
    • error of location a couple hundred kilometers off or more is possible with complex thermocline conditions

      • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Monday April 28, 2014 @12:24PM (#46860839)

        Yes. The next step I'd take is to dip a 37 kHz pinger down to the bottom at a number of locations, measure the received audio signature and build an acoustic model of the area. Then run the actual pinger data back through the model and generate a probability map of where it might be located.

        Only problem with this approach: thermoclines change. And we don't have good models for how they do.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday April 28, 2014 @12:23PM (#46860825)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • If the "elements" are iron and aluminum, in addition to the usual assortment of C, H etc. in plastics, then we're thoroughly [wikipedia.org] screwed [wikipedia.org].

        And they found the comparatively puny airplane in the Bay of Bengal's average depth of 2.6 km? Why the hell aren't we using this super-advanced sensing technology to locate (massive) enemy submarines?

      • You are overlooking the interesting bit, though:

        The team then verified its findings by analysing images from the same area on March 5, three days before the plane disappeared.

        "The wreckage wasn't there prior to the disappearance of MH370," Mr Pope said.

  • So it is not going to be Amelia Earhart either. Dang it.

    CNN is hoping against hope it aint true. It would not know how to fight the withdrawal symptoms if "370 vanishes" story vanishes.

  • by PvtVoid ( 1252388 ) on Monday April 28, 2014 @12:01PM (#46860571)
    Big deal. Courtney love says she found it, too [facebook.com]. I think her diagram might be even better.
    • Re:So what? (Score:5, Funny)

      by PPH ( 736903 ) on Monday April 28, 2014 @12:18PM (#46860767)

      Courtney Love did indeed spot wreckage. But she was looking in a mirror.

      • She may have had her moments, but right now you're the one being an ass.
  • by Alsee ( 515537 ) on Monday April 28, 2014 @12:08PM (#46860659) Homepage

    Does anyone have any info on what sort of tech this company is using? From the little info in the article I get the impression they are using satellite images? I'm rather skeptical that surface images can pick up elemental signals from the sea floor at substantial depth.

    -

    • Re:Tech used? (Score:5, Informative)

      by fremsley471 ( 792813 ) on Monday April 28, 2014 @12:25PM (#46860849)

      They are using a vary basic form of technology called bullshit. 100%, unrefined. It's impossible to do what they say from 'satellite images'. If they had a large fleet of low-flying aircraft with extraordinarily sensitive magnetometers, it may just be possible. From orbit? Complete and utter bollocks.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    In the Bay of Bengal? One of the most polluted areas of ocean imaginable? The area where ships and planes are scrapped? My money is on a false positive.

  • by funwithBSD ( 245349 ) on Monday April 28, 2014 @12:14PM (#46860737)

    It was just some guy and his lady in a 30's prop job on the bottom of the ocean.

    • LOL, Only if Noonan and Earhart both manged to fly west when they should have been going east.. Then there is the matter of the Itasca actually receiving voice signals from Earhart... But hey, we can dream.

      This company is about as credible here as if they made your claim..

      • hey they could have been carried by currents by now...

        Anyway, there is good evidence where they did end up landing and likely dying already.

        • Anyway, there is good evidence where they did end up landing and likely dying already.

          Not necessarily in that order, but I agree. What goes up, comes down. Aircraft that run out of fuel, do not fly very long or far. In this case it is at the bottom of the ocean north and west of Perth.

  • Physics Rules! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BoRegardless ( 721219 ) on Monday April 28, 2014 @12:20PM (#46860791)

    Using sensors which can pick signatures over time (bother before and after the crash) of various metals, like aluminum, titanium and steel (radiation as in spectrophotomry), sounds like the type of info you need. Getting it out of satellite info from orbit is a bit of a surprise to me.

    What this indicated, from the article, to me is that the military has far higher capabilities than I ever thought.

  • is all of those people who are saying that people are searching in the wrong area using uncorroborated data. Is this a last ditch want of hope from people, or is there something seriously scientifically missed? And if the latter, why are they searching where they are?

  • by T.E.D. ( 34228 ) on Monday April 28, 2014 @12:25PM (#46860855)

    I just looked in my trashcan here at work, an I may have found MH370 wreckage. Almost certainly I have not, but still I may have.

    Until confirmed one way or the other, CNN should really send a team over to my office to report on the movements of the neighborhood dogs.

  • In light of MH 370, all aircraft are required to stream their black box and GPS data into the cloud. It's amazing how in this day and technological age that this can actually happen.
    • Technically, it is certainly possible to do.

      Practically, it's too expensive to justify. It isn't like planes drop from the sky all of the time. You would need a number of expensive satellites, additional expensive equipment in the aircraft, computers and other bits and pieces to put it all together. You will probably see some politician suggest this ('think of the children...") but it won't go anywhere.

    • Well, in this case, much of this information WOULD have been uploaded, had the airline coughed up the yearly fee of about 15K per aircraft. Air France pays the fees, but Malaysian airlines apparently doesn't.

      Everything but the law is already here.

  • That is close to the northernmost one of the two arcs that Inmarsat deduced the last ping must have come from, so I guess it's not entirely implausible.

    It doesn't seem likely to me that the plane would still be completely intact though, which seems to be implicit in this article. If it fell out of the sky due to lack of fuel, which currently seems the most likely scenario, it would have impacted the water at high speed and would surely have broken up.

    • by burni2 ( 1643061 )

      If you draw a line between the last civilian radar contact and the
      last military contact

      CIVIL 6Â 55â 15â N, 103Â 34â 43â E
      MIL 5Â 40â 50â N, 98Â 56â 27â E

      You would extrapolate to the bay of bengal.

      But: Airplanes when they are out of fuel do not "fall" out of the sky.

      Like airgliders these aircraft have the ability to enter a glide path, if you don't stall the aircraft. Also a water landing where the hull mostly remains intact is possible however as so

  • From the images I saw the grid they use is pretty fine,
    if shape and grid do really conform each other, then the resolution is approx 100mx100m so the position in this grid is also very detailed. WikiP-tells me The water depth is "4694 " at max and
    2600m average.

    This is not so challenging, also the Indian Navy(submarine+sub hunters) operates in these waters so the best address to transfer the coordinates to is India. If they could check the deep sea surface there with sonar imaging.

    hard Result: Positive or Ne

  • by Captain_Chaos ( 103843 ) on Monday April 28, 2014 @01:09PM (#46861267)

    I'm not convinced about the scientific integrity of this company. What they claim to be able to do sounds very vague, shady and too good to be true and there's a telling lack of concrete facts about how their technique works. The "learn more about GeoResonance technology" page is conveniently "under construction". The brief summary states they use:

    • Earth Remote Sensing.
    • Multispectral imaging.
    • Gamma irradiation.
    • Radiation chemistry.
    • NMR spectroscopy.
    • Proprietary know-how.

    Sounds a lot like pseudoscientific technobabble to me, absent more details. I'm getting a hint of Steorn here...

    • by kyrsjo ( 2420192 )

      I came here to say the same - the homepage of GeoResonance is *extremely* light on the technology they use, which mostly sounds like some kind of remote NMR. But how do they excite a signal, and how do they detect it? Also, most of the images they show seems to be super-coarse spatial resolution, useful for finding oil and minerals, but not so much a plane on the oceanfloor.

      Finally, even if they had the data, how would they find a tiny signal in their apparently huge dataset which just accidentally happened

      • I came here to say the same - the homepage of GeoResonance is *extremely* light on the technology they use, which mostly sounds like some kind of remote NMR. But how do they excite a signal, and how do they detect it?

        The earth carries a huge magnetic field. Much bigger than the magnets in a NMR. As for the exciter - what do you think HAARP [wikipedia.org] is for?

        Heck, it you would have stayed awake in your marketing classes, you'd know this already.

    • by burni2 ( 1643061 )

      Earth Remote Sensing = using sattellite sensors (different sensors)

      Multispectral imaging = common you combine data from sensors that have different spectra, like overlaying an RGB CCC with data from a thermal imaging sensor .. (Predator)

      Gamma irradiation = yes possible, during cold war the US sent satelites into the orbit search for gamma ray bursts (which you would expect from a nuclear test) and they found many because the REDS tested their nukes in far away galaxies, just kidding extra terrestrial Quasar

    • you left out inverting the power feed to the deflector dish
    • Yeah and I may not be a geography whiz but I doubt the bay of Bengal is off Australia

    • Decades ago, my uncle who spent his life chasing one get-rich-quick scheme or another was telling me of his latest investment opportunity.

      He had invested with a man who had built a device that could be pointed at a hillside and provide a readout of the proportions of the various elements within. Considering the possibilities of magnetic resonance, I was ready to grant his story a bit of credence. When he then told me you could take a photograph of a hillside and the same device could make the same analysis,

  • To get some free publicity.
  • This is really interesting from the standpoint of, if it is true it's nowhere at all near where they are currently searching - where a ping was detected.

    So if this new position turns out to be correct, what was that ping?

    Also very interesting this information was discovered two weeks before the batter on the pinger ran out, but it doesn't seem to have been followed up on.

    • by jrumney ( 197329 )

      So if this new position turns out to be correct, what was that ping?

      The Chinese saving face after they'd announced a few days earlier that they'd detected a ping, and noone else that looked in the same area had found it.

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