They're going to spend 4 days trying to relocate pings? Did someone throw away the ping coordinates?

[jberryhill]

7. Underwater acoustic expert?

I love how everyone on DU is suddenly an expert in so many complex things. Having detected a highly attenuated signal at a location in very deep ocean doesn't pinpoint the location of jack shit.

Anything that floats is long gone from the surface from where anything is resting on the bottom of a very deep ocean. I suppose they should just swim down and have a look.

Let's say you knew, within a radius of even a few miles, where a relatively small object is resting on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Okay, what's your next move?

It's not as if the fuselage is resting intact down there, so even if you then do a sonar survey of the bottom in this 5 mile radius (i.e. about 80 square mile) area, you are looking for things maybe twenty feet large and trying to decide whether you are seeing an object, surface irregularities, or just noise.

But, yeah, head on down there with your deep seawater penetrating super vision and sort them all out.