For the families of 239 passengers and crew who boarded a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014, the years since have been an agony of grief and bewilderment. Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 not only failed to arrive at its destination but vanished altogether. The aircraft has never been found. Australia, China and Malaysia have been co-ordinating a search for it across 120,000sq km of sea floor in the south Indian ocean and have suspended operations after spending $150 million.
The decision has justification. It would give relief to the bereaved to know even roughly where their loved ones lie and what caused the aircraft to fail but resources are limited. Knowing what happened might add to the literature of airline risks, even though air travel is already safe. The tragedy of MH370 underscores instead the vastness of what we don’t know. Namely, most of the planet.
Arthur C Clarke observed: “How inappropriate to call this planet earth, when it is quite clearly ocean.” As such, it is inaccessible and unknown to us. Other mammalian species, such as the ancestors of whales, have migrated from land to the oceans. But humans know the surface of the seas, and very little of what lies beneath.
Unlike rocks, which are tractable to scientific inquiry, waters leave no trace of history. The oceans’ size relative to land is immense but even more confounding is what they contain cannot be observed directly: it takes sounding gear to find the contours of the seabed and its marine life.
Science has taken humans to the moon and yielded immensely detailed knowledge of the properties of electrons, protons and neutrons, the basic constituents of atoms. We may just have to accept for the time being that the greatest mysteries are earthbound rather than subatomic or astronomical.