The tragic disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 on 8 March 2014 led to a deep-ocean search effort of unprecedented scale and detail. Between June 2014 and June 2016, geophysical survey teams aboard ships used echo sounding techniques to create state-of-the-art maps of the seafloor topography and profiles of the sediments below the ocean floor in a zone spanning about 108,000 square miles of the southeastern Indian Ocean. The curved search swath is 40 to 85 nautical miles wide, and it sweeps from northeast to southwest. It centers on Broken Ridge and extends roughly 1,350 nautical miles from the eastern flank of Batavia Seamount to the Geelvinck Fracture Zone. Aircraft debris found along the shores of the western Indian Ocean is consistent with drift modeling that indicates the aircraft entered the sea in the search area. The data set that emerged from this search effort constitutes the largest high-resolution multibeam echo sounder mapping effort for the Indian Ocean, covering an area about the size of New Zealand. Previous ocean floor maps in this region had an average spatial resolution (pixel size) of more than 2 square miles, but the new maps resolve features smaller than 2.5 acres. Crucially, the new data provided the geospatial framework for the last phase of the search, in which search teams deployed deep-water, high-resolution acoustic and optical imaging instruments with the ability to identify aircraft wreckage.

Marine geophysicist Mike Coffin investigates interactions between the oceanic environment and the solid Earth. After growing up in Bangor and Surry, he was educated Dartmouth College (AB) and Columbia University (MA, MPhil, PhD). Ever since, he has pursued an international career that reflects the boundless nature of the global ocean. He has worked in Australia (1985-1989; 2011-present), the US (1990-2001), Japan (2001-2007), and the UK (2008-2010). He has also held visiting positions in the US (1982, 2002, 2016-present), Norway (1992, 1996), Australia (2000), and France (2001). Mike served as inaugural Executive Director of the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) at the University of Tasmania (UTAS), and is currently Emeritus Professor at UTAS, Research Professor at the University of Maine, and Adjunct Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Mike has led or participated in 37 blue-water research expeditions totalling >1,000 days at sea, focused mainly in the Southern, Pacific, and Indian oceans.