CANBERRA, Australia – The undersea search for the Malaysian airliner that vanished almost two years ago has found a likely 19th century shipwreck deep in the Indian Ocean off the west Australian coast, officials said Wednesday.
A sonar search for the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 found what appeared to be a man-made object on Dec. 19, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said in a statement.
A follow-up investigation using an underwater drone captured high-resolution sonar images on Jan. 2 that confirmed that the find was a shipwreck, said the bureau, which is running the search for the Boeing 777 which vanished on March 8, 2014.
The Shipwreck Galleries of the Western Australian Museum conducted a preliminary review of the images and advised that the wreck was likely to be a steel or iron ship dating from the turn of the 19th century, the bureau said.
The bureau on Thursday corrected the potential age of the wreck to the middle of the 19th century or later.
"It looks like a large iron or steel sailing ship sitting upright and very intact dating from mid-to-late 19th, possibly early 20th century," museum maritime archaeologist Ross Anderson told the bureau in a statement.
"It appears it is collapsing in classic iron ship fashion with the bow and stern triangles upright and intact and side plating collapsing out to starboard," Anderson added.
Anderson said he was not able identify the name of the ship based on the image or say whether it had three or four masts, which would narrow the possibilities. He estimated it was 260 feet long.
"It is all but impossible to identify ships or their country of manufacture/port of origin without being able to do more detailed artefact studies, as so many have been lost over the years," Anderson said.
"Often the best clue is something like crockery that may have visible the name of the shipping line or similar," he added.
The wreck was found under water 12,100 feet deep, 1,600 miles southwest of the Australian port of Fremantle where the three search vessels are based, the bureau said.
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http://www.foxnews.com/science/2016/01/13/ocean-search-for-wreckage-malaysia-airlines-flight-370-finds-2nd-shipwreck.html?intcmp=hplnws
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« Last Edit: January 13, 2016, 05:30:53 pm by salvor6 »
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