Story highlights A vehicle called a towfish strikes a 2,200-meter-high mud volcano, sinks to the ocean floor 
 
 The vessel towing it will return to Western Australia for a replacement cable, officials say 
 
 A search of the complete area is still expected to take until mid-2017, authorities say 
 
 (CNN) A sonar vehicle used in the search for the wreckage of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has been lost after striking an underwater volcano in the southern Indian Ocean, according to search officials. 
 
 The vehicle -- called a towfish -- was being towed behind the Fugro Discovery, a specialist search vessel engaged in the hunt for the missing airliner, when it struck the 2,200-meter-high mud volcano Sunday, according to the Joint Agency Coordination Center, or JACC. 
 
 As a result, the towfish's cable broke, sending the vehicle and 4.5 kilometers (2.8 miles) of cable to the ocean floor. 
 
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 The JACC, an Australian government agency created to coordinate search efforts for MH370, said that no crew members were injured. 
 
 It was believed the towfish, which scans the ocean floor, could be recovered, the JACC said in a statement. ||||| This article is over 3 years old 
 
 Australian-led team scouring the southern Indian Ocean finds anchor and debris from uncharted wreck at depth of nearly 4,000 metres 
 
 The hunt for missing the Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has uncovered a previously uncharted shipwreck, leading officials to say on Wednesday that if the plane is in their search zone they will find it. 
 
 
 
 The Australian-led team is scouring the southern Indian Ocean seabed in hope of finding the final resting place of MH370, which vanished on 8 March 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. 
 
 No wreckage from the flight, which was carrying 239 people, has been found. 
 
 In an update on the search, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said it had spotted “multiple small bright reflections” on the otherwise featureless seabed which warranted close inspection. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest A previously uncharted shipwreck found whilst searching for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has led officials to say that if the plane is in their search zone they will find it. Photograph: FUGRO/AFP/Getty Images 
 
 Data from a high-resolution sonar scan using an autonomous underwater vehicle revealed possible items, mostly only about the size of a cricket ball, some 3,900 metres (12,795 feet) underwater. 
 
 While the debris field appeared to be of human-made origin, it failed to have all the characteristics of a typical aircraft debris field so authorities sent down an underwater camera which discovered the shipwreck. 
 
 “It’s a fascinating find,” said Peter Foley, director of the operational search for MH370. “But it’s not what were looking for.” 
 
 Images clearly showed an anchor, along with other objects the searchers said were human-made. 
 
 Foley said officials were not pausing in the search for MH370, whose disappearance is one of aviation’s great mysteries. “Obviously, we’re disappointed that it wasn’t the aircraft, but we were always realistic about the likelihood,” he added. 
 
 “And this event has really demonstrated that the systems, people and the equipment involved in the search are working well. It’s shown that if there’s a debris field in the search area, we’ll find it.” 
 
 The search for the aircraft has been a complex undertaking, with Australia concentrating on a remote area of the southern Indian Ocean far off its west coast spanning 60,000 square kilometres (23,166 square miles). ||||| 1 of 7. A fast response craft from Australian Defence Vessel Ocean Shield tows Able Seaman Clearance Diver Michael Arnold as he searches the ocean for debris in the search zone in the southern Indian Ocean for the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 in this picture released by the Australian Defence Force April 8, 2014. 
 
 SYDNEY/PERTH, Australia (Reuters) - An Australian ship which picked up possible "pings" from the black box recorders of a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner has been unable to detect any further signals and time is running out to narrow the massive search, officials said on Tuesday. 
 
 Angus Houston, head of the Australian agency coordinating the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, said the month-long hunt in the Indian Ocean was at a critical stage given the batteries in the black box beacons had already reached the end of their 30-day expected life. 
 
 A U.S. Navy "towed pinger locator" onboard Australia's Ocean Shield picked up two signals consistent with black box locator beacons over the weekend - the first for more than two hours and the second for about 13 minutes. 
 
 Houston said the signals represented the best lead in the search yet, but efforts to pick up the pings again had so far been unsuccessful. 
 
 "If we don't get any further transmissions, we have a reasonably large search area of the bottom of the ocean to prosecute and that will take a long, long time. It's very slow, painstaking work," said Houston. 
 
 The black boxes record cockpit data and may provide answers about what happened to the plane, which was carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew when it vanished on March 8 and flew thousands of kilometers off its Kuala Lumpur-to-Beijing route. 
 
 Authorities say evidence, including the loss of communications, suggests the plane was deliberately diverted by someone familiar with the aircraft, but have not ruled out mechanical problems. 
 
 Analysis of satellite data led investigators to conclude the Boeing 777 came down in an area some 1,680 km (1,040 miles) northwest of Perth, near where possible pings were picked up and the search is now focused. 
 
 BLUEFIN ON HOLD 
 
 An autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) named Bluefin-21 is onboard the Ocean Shield and could be sent to look for wreckage on the sea floor, but narrowing the search zone first was critical, Houston said. 
 
 "It is a large area for a small submersible that has a very narrow field of search, and of course, it is literally crawling along the bottom of the ocean," he said. 
 
 "That's why it's so important to get another transmission and we need to continue until there's absolutely no chance the (black box) device is still transmitting." 
 
 The Bluefin will scour the ocean floor in 20-hour missions using sonar in an attempt to find the aircraft, before its findings are downloaded and analyzed on board the Ocean Shield. 
 
 If anything unusual is spotted, the sonar on board the robotic vehicle will be replaced with a camera to take a closer look. The potential search area is about 4.5 km (2.8 miles) deep, the outer reach of the Bluefin's range. 
 
 Some 133 missions have been completed so far in the multinational aerial hunt for debris in the southern Indian Ocean and would continue, officials said. 
 
 Up to 11 military planes, three civilian planes and 14 ships planned to take part in the search on Tuesday, with good weather in the search area. But so far, searchers have only turned up fishing gear and other detritus. 
 
 "Even after the black box is found, the surface search will continue because they're looking for evidence to investigate why the aircraft went down," Lieutenant Commander Adam Schantz, the officer in charge of U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon search unit, told Reuters. 
 
 "So, we'll continue for a while trying to find anything on the surface that might give a reasoning behind the accident." 
 
 (Additional reporting by Jane Wardell in Sydney and Anuradha Raghu in Kuala Lumpur; Editing by Dean Yates and Michael Perry)
– A "towfish" sonar vehicle searching for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 didn't find the missing plane, but it did find a 7,400-foot-tall underwater volcano…when it crashed right into it on Sunday, NBC News reports. The towfish was being dragged by a search vessel and scanning the floor of the Indian Ocean when it hit the volcano. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, searchers plan to recover the million-dollar towfish, which is sitting under more than 8,500 feet of water, sometime in the future. The search vessel has a backup towfish but has to travel to Australia to replace the 2.8-mile cable it also lost in the accident, CNN reports. The trip will cause a 12-day delay in the search for the missing plane. Flight MH370 has been missing since March 2014, when it disappeared with 239 people onboard while traveling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, NBC reports. Searchers have covered about 70%—more than 32,000 square miles—of the search zone so far. If they haven't turned up any "credible new information" on the location of the missing plane by the time they complete the entire zone in mid-2016, they'll call the search off. In the meantime, the Joint Agency Coordination Center will be investigating to find out exactly how a giant underwater volcano (which the Australian Transport Safety Bureau has a 3D image of) snuck up on its towfish, according to the Morning Herald.