This extensive mapping may enable search crews to pinpoint exactly where the plane crashed.Īll these environmental factors compound the already complicated search for fallen planes.

The Drake is one of the most extensively studied parts of the Southern ocean. The unstable seafloor and fast-moving water could make locating the fallen plane more difficult than in a calmer sea.īut science is on the side of the search and rescue crews. The ocean floor of the Drake Passage also varies wildly, from sand and clay to ice-materials that have drifted from the Antarctic. The extreme temperature variability and the powerful current contribute to frequent and severe storms, huge waves, and challenging sea conditions. The world’s largest ocean current, the Antarctic Cirumpolar Current, which stretches over 12,000 miles, also flows west to east through the Drake Passage. Hypothermia can cause violent shivering, unconsciousness, or cardiac arrest. Any longer and people often develop hypothermia, a condition where the body loses heat faster than it can produce it. In less than a minute of cold-water immersion, humans can suffer cold-water shock, an immediate loss of breathing control which skyrockets the person’s risk of drowning. Human beings aren’t built to withstand such cold water. The Drake’s waters range from 30 to 43 degrees Fahrenheit or -1 to 6 degrees Celsius or -1 to 6 degrees Celsius. In the Drake Passage, the humid, subpolar conditions of Tierra del Fuego and the frigid, polar regions of Antarctica meet - creating a swirling, stormy environment. Thousands of sailors died while making the voyage.Ī tabular iceberg floats in the Drake Passage, Antarctica.

Before that, seamen navigated its perilous waters without a GPS or navigation system, and often ended up in cyclones or shipwrecks. Until the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, crossing the Drake was a necessary, and often life-threatening, undertaking. The first person on record to make the dangerous traverse was Dutch navigator, Willem Schouten, who sailed across it in 1616. Drake discovered the passage in 1578, even though he never sailed it. But the Drake Passage presents hostile environmental challenges that could make finding it extremely difficult.ĭrake Passage got its name from Elizabethan mariner, sea captain and explorer, Sir Francis Drake. Using four ships, thirteen planes, and three satellites, rescue teams are searching for the missing plane and its passengers, focused on the 60 miles near the plane’s last communication. The area contains some of the choppiest and deepest waters on the planet, with frigid temperatures that can induce cold shock and hypothermia within minutes. While there’s no “ideal” place to crash a plane, the Drake Passage is a particularly treacherous part of the ocean to go down. The plane is presumed to have crashed in the icy, turbulent waters of the passage, also called the Sea of Hoces.

The C-130 Hercules aircraft, carrying 38 people, seemingly vanished into thin air over the infamous Drake Passage, a body of water between Cape Horn in South America and the South Shetland Islands in Antarctica, the Chilean military say. It was en route from the southern city of Punta Arenas to a military base in Antarctica - but it doesn’t seem to have made it. Early Tuesday morning, a Chilean military plane went missing mid-flight.

Cast away plane crash