The Best Australian Science Writing 2015 (14 page)

Ritual was important to his people, and in his youth his canine teeth had been knocked out in an initiation ceremony. After he died that night, ritual played its part when his family gathered in mourning to bury him in the dune. As pungent smoke from smouldering branches of emu bush filled the air, they placed him on his back, hands crossed in his lap, and sprinkled him with precious red ochre. Much of this we know from clues in his grave.

For the next 40 millennia, Mungo Man's people found a way to survive by sustainably managing the landscape. As the Ice Age waxed and waned, and waters came and went, they adapted
and thrived. Many years and countless generations later, Mary Pappin thinks back to the lives of her ancestors. She points out that Europeans have been here for just 200 years, less than 1 per cent of that time, yet have already wrought irreparable damage. You can see this on a small scale at Mungo, in the way grazing pressure has caused the dunes to collapse.

‘Aboriginal people have an intense commitment to country even today. Europeans have lost that connection. Country to us is something you dig up and export to China,' Jim says. ‘Mungo Man's return now is essential, because it's only when he comes back to his country that his message will really come to life and be heard across Australia. That message is about what have we done to his land and what have we done to his people.'

The vanishing writers

The past may not make you feel better

How dust affects climate, health and … everything

Uncharted waters

Daniel Stacey

In the weeks after Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 vanished, most likely in the Indian Ocean, Australian officials said they knew less about the area they were exploring than is known about the surface of the moon.

It's actually even worse than that.

Surveys of Mars and Venus are considered around 250 times more accurate than existing maps of the underwater region where Flight 370 searchers are looking – a lightless, virtually lifeless seabed.

There, the contours of the ocean floor have only been approximated by bouncing satellite radar off the surface of the sea, or by taking low-resolution sonar soundings from boats that passed through the area a generation ago. Research indicates the presence of dramatic vistas, including a volcanic plateau and mountains roughly the height of the Swiss Alps. There is so little bacteria that scientists believe a whale carcass would take decades to decompose down there.

The hunt for Flight 370 has been overshadowed in recent days by the Malaysia Airlines jet shot down in Ukraine, but it remains one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history. Unlike the Ukraine tragedy, which left tons of debris, not even a stray
suitcase has been found from Flight 370, which disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on 8 March with 239 passengers on board, leaving little more than a trail of cryptic satellite transmissions behind as it diverted off course.

Investigators have used those digital handshakes between the plane and an Inmarsat PLC telecommunications satellite to identify an area the size of West Virginia where they think the plane crashed in the water after it ran out of fuel. But an initial effort to probe the depths in a different area using a submersible drone called Bluefin-21 found nothing.

Now, two months after pausing its search, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau is ready to reboot the massive probe. It is poised to select among bids from the world's most advanced deep-water specialists, including offshore oil-and-gas companies, maritime research institutions and treasure hunters eager to use their technologies and experience to solve the Flight 370 riddle – and potentially raise their own profiles in the process. The ATSB is expected to choose one or more of the bidders over the next several weeks before relaunching the search with US$56 million in funding in late August 2015. Those costs will be split, in amounts still to be determined, between the Australian and Malaysian governments.

The good news is that the world's deep-sea recovery industry is now more sophisticated than ever, thanks to offshore research by oil-and-gas firms that have gone progressively deeper, as well as militaries and insurance firms. Technologies developed to hunt for everything from the
Titanic
to lost parts of the space shuttle
Challenger
have further expanded frontiers, allowing investigators to work as deep as about 3.7 miles, or slightly more than the deepest-known area of the Flight 370 search zone.

‘It used to be that when a ship sank in the deep sea, we would commit the ship and souls for eternity to the deep – gone forever,' said David Gallo, director of special projects at Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution, the Massachusetts-based research outfit that helped find Air France Flight 447, which disappeared in the mid-Atlantic Ocean in 2009, and is bidding to participate in the Flight 370 hunt. ‘That's not true anymore.'

But with no hard evidence of where the plane went down, the search will test the recovery industry's abilities like nothing before. In June, Australian authorities shifted the search zone for a third time – by about 1000 kilometres to the south-west – after reanalysing satellite transmissions. Even then, they said it was impossible to know whether the fresh search area would prove correct.

At stake is the emotional wellbeing of relatives and friends of the passengers from the plane, left in suspended animation while authorities search for answers. There is also the issue of maintaining public trust in the aviation industry, which rarely experiences unsolved disasters.

For its part, Australia has such a visible role because the waters are in a region it handles under a global civil aviation agreement. Under the bidding process, companies angling to play a role in the search can work alone or bid as part of a consortium. Each signed nondisclosure agreements about their bids with the Australian government, but
The Wall Street Journal
was able to confirm through people familiar with the process at least eight outfits that are bidding for a role.

Among them: Fugro NV, a Dutch oil-and-gas consulting firm that has brought its top subsea sonar guru out of retirement to help with the effort. Others include Oceaneering International Inc., a Houston oil-services firm that makes space suits and robotically controlled amusement park rides, and also helped find the
Titanic
in 1985.

Then there are the treasure hunters – companies and individuals that make a living exploring the deep for profit. One is Odyssey Marine Explorations Inc., a Florida firm listed on the
Nasdaq that a few years ago recovered around $500 million from a Spanish ship sunk off Portugal in 1804.

Others include Williamson & Associates, a Seattle outfit led partly by Art Wright, a well-known underwater explorer who still rows competitively in his 70s. Another is Blue Water Recoveries, a UK firm led by bearded oceanographer David Mearns which holds the Guinness World Record for the deepest wreck ever discovered: a German World War II blockade runner known as
Rio Grande
, found in 1996 over 5500 metres below the surface.

‘It is definitely the search of my generation,' said Colleen Keller, a senior analyst at Metron Inc., a Virginia-based scientific consulting firm that also has joined a consortium competing for the Flight 370 contract. Her firm assisted with the Air France search and has also worked with the US Department of Homeland Security.

Efforts to reclaim lost vessels from the depths go back hundreds of years. In 1834, the British warship
Royal George
was partially salvaged using diving helmets with breathing apparatuses based on a design originally improvised from an old suit of armour and a fire hose.

In the 1930s, a mission was proposed to recover valuables from the torpedoed ocean liner
Lusitania
using a 60-metre stairwell sealed in an iron tube. While the tube itself was built, the money to search the ship – lying more than 90 metres underwater – ran out. Since then, many divers and documentary crews have reached the wreckage.

Searchers went far deeper in the 1960s and '70s, when searching equipment improved and military emergencies pushed engineers to stretch their technologies.

In 1966, the US Navy lost a hydrogen bomb in the Mediterranean after a mid-air collision between a B-52 bomber and refuelling plane. Afraid the bomb would fall into the wrong hands, the Navy sought help from Woods Hole scientists who were
experimenting with a miniature submarine called
Alvin
– one of the world's first deep-sea submersible vehicles. It located the bomb at a depth of about 885 metres.

A few years later, the US Navy spent two years searching for a missing film cache that had fallen back to Earth from a spy satellite. This time, it used a manned submarine developed in-house to recover the film from nearly 5000 metres deep.

Deep-sea searchers soon realised sonar devices, rather than the human eye, allowed for large areas to be quickly assessed for debris, or underwater mines that threatened submarines. Especially useful was side-scan sonar, a technology developed by the US Navy and at research institutes including the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1950s.

Side-scan sonar works by sending high-powered pulses laterally into the water from a device usually about 45 metres off the seafloor. The pulses hit objects – rocks, debris, mountains, valley walls – and bounce back toward the device, where they are received and integrated into an image that displays a shadow of what is on the bottom of the ocean.

By the 1980s these devices were widely available and robust enough to endure the pressure of deep waters. Treasure hunters, meanwhile, were experimenting with new methods to take cameras and sonar devices deeper.

Ships consigned to oblivion for decades or even centuries were discovered, including the
Titanic.
It was found in 1985 using a device developed by Woods Hole called the
Argo
, a towed sled equipped with cameras and strobe lights which fed data back to a ship on a long cable.

Similar sled vehicles fitted with side-scan sonar were used by Williamson & Associates in 1988 to locate the wreck of the SS
Central America
, or ‘Ship of Gold', which sank off the coast of the Carolinas during a hurricane in 1857 with up to US$760 million
in gold at today's prices. It caused such a loss to US banks that it helped spark one of the first global financial crises – the Panic of 1857. A diving firm funded by a consortium recently recovered nearly 1000 ounces of gold, but the ship may still have some 16 tonnes remaining.

The technologies also found a market stamping out shippinginsurance swindles. In one case in 1990, a company later acquired by Oceaneering International searched for a cargo ship called the
Lucona
after it was blown up by an Austrian businessman who later changed his identity with plastic surgery. When he was eventually caught, he goaded investigators to find the missing ship and prove he was guilty – which they did, in waters some 4300 metres deep.

Yet the challenge of locating missing jet aircraft can be far more difficult.

When a plane strikes the water, even in a gentle belly glide, only a few large pieces of debris tend to stay intact. The engines – and their virtually indestructible turbines – snap off and sink to the bottom. Sometimes the cockpit will survive the impact. Much of the rest of the plane usually disintegrates.

On a flat, featureless sea floor, these large pieces of debris send back strong images, known as ‘hard targets', to a sonar device. But they can easily become camouflaged in rock fields or ravines.

The earlier hunt for Air France Flight 447 illustrates the complexities. Investigators found debris on the ocean surface, giving them a relatively good idea of where the plane went down. But the subsequent search, with contributions from Woods Hole, Metron and Mr Mearns of Blue Water Recoveries, took two more years.

Searchers ruled out areas near the plane's last communicated location after an undersea pinger locator failed to detect emergency beacon signals there. Instead they relied on complex drift models that tracked movements of debris and bodies found
floating on the Atlantic Ocean to determine a probable final location of the plane.

Arguments over the models – which proved wrong – delayed the search for the plane. It eventually was found in the same zone where the pinger locator had originally searched.

With Flight 370, investigators don't have the benefit of debris or precise final coordinates to give them a starting point. Moreover, the patch of sea they have identified as the plane's most likely resting place is one of the least-understood places in the world, 1800 kilometres off Western Australia.

The only sonar surveys of the underwater topography were taken by boats that passed through the area mainly in the 1960s and 1970s, including a Soviet research vessel called
Vityaz
that now is a floating museum in Kaliningrad. A core sample of nearby seabed taken by a different Soviet vessel found compact yellow mud made from millions of years of accumulated plankton exoskeletons. Carbon dating showed that it took a thousand years for less than a fifth of an inch of new mud to settle.