04 May 2018•Update: 04 May 2018
By Recep Sakar
MELBOURNE
Researchers looking for the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 that went missing in 2014, have found shipwrecks of two 19th century merchant vessels off the coast of Western Australia.
The shipwrecks -- one wooden and the other iron -- were found in 2015 at a depth of about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) and roughly 36 km (22 miles) apart from each other, according to a statement from the Western Australian Museum.
The vessels are believed to have been British and were carrying coal.
Flight MH370, carrying 239 passengers and crew, disappeared from radars shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing on March 8, 2014. The search for the missing flight ended on January 2017.
Experts from the Western Australian Museum and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau analyzed sonar and video data to determine the origin of the ships.
Dr. Ross Anderson, curator of maritime archaeology at the Western Australian Museum, said: “For the wooden ship the brig W. Gordon and the barque Magdala are two possible candidates; for the iron ship the barques Kooringa (1894), Lake Ontario (1897) and West Ridge (1883) are possible, with the West Ridge best fitting the evidence.”
“The evidence points to the ship sinking as a result of a catastrophic event such as explosion which was common in the transport of coal cargoes,” Anderson said.
According to Anderson, while the wooden vessel weighed between 225 and 800 tons, the iron barque would have weighed between 1,000 and 1,500 tons.
