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The possibility of finding floating debris from missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has become highly unlikely, and a new phase of the search will focus on a far larger area of the Indian Ocean floor, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said on Monday.

The search for Flight MH370, which vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8 with 239 people on board, including 154 Chinese passengers, has so far failed to find any trace of the plane.

Abbott said that efforts will now shift from the visual searches that had been conducted by planes and ships to underwater equipment capable of scouring the ocean floor with sophisticated sensors, Reuters reported.

But he conceded that it was possible nothing would be found of the jetliner.

"We will do everything we humanly can, everything we reasonably can, to solve this mystery," he told reporters in Canberra.

Malaysia, China, Japan, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, Britain and the United States are assisting Australia in the most expensive search in aviation history.

It remains unclear what caused the Boeing 777 to veer sharply off course and disappear from radar as it prepared to enter Vietnamese airspace.

Malaysian authorities have not ruled out mechanical problems, but say evidence suggests it was deliberately diverted from its scheduled route.

Malaysia is under pressure to bring closure to the grieving families by finding wreckage to definitively determine what happened to the aircraft.

But the ocean northwest of the Australian city of Perth is one of the most remote places in the world and one of the deepest oceans.

The US navy Bluefin-21 underwater drone searching the seabed has so far failed to turn up any sign of the plane.

Abbott said that the new search area, which spans 700 km by 80 km, could take six to eight months to completely examine, at a cost to Australia of up to A$60 million ($55.7 million).

（中國日?qǐng)?bào)網(wǎng)英語點(diǎn)津 Helen 編輯）

About the broadcaster:

Anne Ruisi is an editor at China Daily online with more than 30 years of experience as a newspaper editor and reporter. She has worked at newspapers in the U.S., including The Birmingham News in Alabama and City Newspaper of Rochester, N.Y.