The world's most isolated ocean has a long history of making things disappear.
In
1900, Jules Verne published The Castaway of the Flag, an adventure novel
in the shipwreck fantasy subgenre. To put his Swiss Family Robinson in an
excessively remote spot beyond hope of rescue, he plonked them on New
Switzerland, an imaginary island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Then, as
now, the region's main features were its remoteness and isolation -- capable of
hiding an entire island, or simply vanishing a Boeing 777 in its untrafficked
vastness.
On March 24, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced
that the missing Malaysia Airlines fight, which took off March 8 from Kuala
Lumpur en route to Beijing and hasn't been heard from since, "ended in the
Southern Indian Ocean." The loss of MH370 has for the first time turned
the entire world's attention to this region: Big enough to contain Russia
twice, the southern Indian Ocean has been condemned to obscurity by its
emptiness and inhospitality. The ongoing search for the wreckage -- none of the
239 people on board is believed to have survived -- is frustrated by the
extreme remoteness and the harsh climate of the presumed crash zone, in the words
of Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott, "as close to nowhere as it's
possible to be."
Whoever or whatever caused the plan to crash here could not
have found a more desolate locale. The southern Indian Ocean is "out of
normal shipping lanes, out of any commercial flight patterns, with few fishing
boats, and there are no islands," a U.S. government official familiar with
the search effort told CNN. Of all the world's large bodies of water, this may
be the one least explored; to be lost at sea out there is nearly as lethal as
being stranded in outer space.
Distance is hampering the search effort. The planes taking
part in the search fly out from Perth, Australia, the closest city to a debris
field floating in the ocean that may be MH370's wreckage. But it's still
roughly 1,600 miles away, and the 8-hour round-trip flight from Perth limits
the time available for actual reconnaissance.
Not that there are other options besides Perth: There simply
isn't anything closer by -- let alone inhabited lands. The closest spit of land
is the French archipelago of Kerguelen, uninhabited but for a rotating staff of
what must be the world's most bored meteorologists. In the 19th century, the
French government even decided against establishing a penal colony on the
Delaware-sized island because it would be too cruel on the inmates. The only
way off the Kerguelen is via a freighter, which takes 10 days to reach the
nearest airport. (Kerguelen is also known, aptly, as Desolation Islands.)
The southern Indian Ocean is not only remote, but it has
worse weather than just about any other place on the planet. Storms have
hampered the search by grounding flights, reducing the usefulness of the handful
of vessels in the area (including an Australian Navy ship and a Chinese
icebreaker), and further dispersing and submerging much of the debris floating
on the surface.
Storms are the rule rather than the exception in this part
of the world, plagued by the Roaring Forties -- the never-ending winds that
howl around 40 degrees latitude south. The weather, combined with the fact that
this zone, just north of Antarctica, is the only place where water can flow
around the globe without hitting land, means that the waves are among the
highest in the world. (Surfing is inadvisable.) That these are some of the deepest
parts of the Indian Ocean, with a rugged and volcanic ocean floor, decreases
the likelihood that the black boxes would be retrievable. All of which adds up
to an almost impossible race against time: Those black boxes have limited
battery life and will likely stop transmitting around April 7.
The mystery of Flight 370 will be added to the slim corpus
of stories set in the southern Indian Ocean. Apart from Verne's delightful
fiction (the shipwrecked family brings order and progress to the uninhabited island),
one very real horror story keeps floating to the surface. In the 17th century,
the Dutch ship Batavia was stranded on the Houtman Abrolhos, a
collection of reefs and islands off the western Australian coast. A group of
mutineers instigated a reign of terror over the survivors, killing more than
100 before they themselves were executed by the officers arriving in a relief
vessel. Despite the infamy thus bestowed on the Abrolhos, these same reefs
later proved the undoing of the Zeewijk, a Dutch East India Company ship
that crashed there in 1727. Eighty-two of the initial 208 men stranded on the
islands managed to reach the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in a craft they
built from the Zeewijk's wreckage -- the first boat ever built in
Australia.
The Dutch persisted in this dangerous route because they
chose to ride the winds of the Roaring Forties due east across the Indian Ocean
rather than take the straighter, slower route closer to India to their colonies
in the East Indies. If they overshot their trajectory, the ships would crash
into the rocks and reefs off western Australia. The original ghost ship, the
Flying Dutchman, was said to have perished in a violent storm in these parts.
Over time, sailors learned to keep away from the southern
Indian Ocean, the furthest place from anywhere that anyone could ever dread to
find themselves -- except if one had the good fortune to land on the shores of
New Switzerland. What was the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 doing here,
thousands of miles off course, disastrously far from any runway, its nose
pointed towards Antarctica? Until it gives up the answer, the southern Indian
Ocean remains part of the mystery.
Credit: F. Jacobs
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