Two miles beneath the sea surface where satellites and planes are looking for debris from the missing Malaysian jet, the ocean floor is cold, dark, covered in a squishy muck of dead plankton and — in a potential break for the search — mostly flat. The troubling exception is a steep, rocky drop ending in a deep trench.
Read the rest of The Big Story article on the current (post-28 March 2014) search for Malaysian Airlines MH370 in the south-east Indian Ocean, written by Nick Perry and Justin Pritchard from The Associated Press, for which I provided some geographical input.