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Malaysian airliner MH370 disappeared five years ago this week. On March 8, 2014, MH370, a Boeing 777 carrying 239 people disappeared between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing. Although debris discovered along the Indian Ocean coastline narrowed previous searches, the wreckage site was never found.

But now an ambitious project to map Earth’s entire ocean floor could “absolutely” piece together the puzzle of the missing Malaysian airliner MH370, a leading expert has said.

We do need new technology – we can only down so far without it Wendy Watson-Wright, CEO of the Ocean Frontier Institute

The Seabed 2030 project will map the entire ocean floor by using cutting-edge to explore every contour within ten years. Seabed 2030 could supply the answers still sought by the families of the missing MH370 passengers. The search for MH370 is now the longest and most expensive search ever undertaken for a commercial plane. READ MORE: Scientists probe supermassive BLACK HOLE to disprove Einstein theory

Seabed 2030: The £3billion project could help the search for MH370

Seabed 2030: The project will map the entire ocean floor

A £100 million underwater effort to search for MH370 by Malaysia, China and Australia was suspended after making little progress two years ago. Barring any other ideas, ocean mapping could be the answer to one of history’s biggest aircraft mysteries. Scientists leading the $3billion (£2.2billion) Seabed 2030 project have revealed only nine per cent of the world's ocean floors have so far been mapped in high definition. This means we know more about the surface of other planets than we do the depths of our own world. READ MORE: Mars Deep Drill: NASA plan to dig 10km hole in ALIEN LIFE search

Seabed 2030 team member Geoffroy Lamarche said: “If you go to the deep water, to the deep sea, right up in the centre of the Indian Ocean or the Pacific Ocean, you actually could miss entire mountains.” A total of 71 percent of Earth's surface is covered with water but less than one fifth has been mapped - and only half of this used high-resolution imagery. The UN-backed project is urging countries and companies to pool data to create a map of the entire ocean floor which will be freely accessible to all. READ MORE: Scientists build ‘self-aware’ robot able to REPAIR ITSELF

Seabed 2030: Only nine per cent of the world's ocean floors have so far been mapped

MH370: An autonomous underwater vehicle is launched in the search