Oct 08, 2014 11:05 AM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

The search for MH370, the long-missing Malaysian Airlines plane, is still on and the area has been moved about 500 miles south after new analysis.

According to Bloomberg News, investigators with the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) believe the plane made a turn earlier than previously believed. MH370 officially disappeared on March 8, 2014 at 6:28 p.m. GMT, but the new analysis suggests the plane veered off its course as much as 12 minutes earlier.

"Recent refinement to the analysis has given greater certainty about when the aircraft turned," the ATSB wrote in a statement on their website Wednesday. "The underwater search should be prioritized further south."

According to CNN, the plane was carrying 239 people, but absolutely none have left any trace in the original search area. Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak had said in an official announcement that satellite data suggested MH370 "ended in the southern Indian Ocean."

One likely culprit for why there are no traces of the plane or its passengers is how profoundly little of the ocean floor mankind has actually found. BBC News recently reported that a new study has discovered never-before-seen ocean floor mountains and the authors also said that less than 10 percent of the world's oceans are surveyed in such detail.

"We've seen so little, we've explored and sampled so little of the sea floor," Dr. Lisa Levin, a professor and researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, told CNN. "Searching for this plane is a pretty good example of that."

Now stretching to eight months, the search for MH370 is the longest in aviation history, Bloomberg News reported. The most confounding aspect of the search has been how abruptly ground control lost communication with the plane and investigators have been unable to explain why.

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