 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 towfish and 14,700 feet of cable broke free from the ship and are now resting on floor of the southern Indian Ocean. Should credible new information emerge that can be used to identify the specific location of the aircraft, consideration will be given to determining next steps. It is expected the search operations currently being undertaken by Fugro Equator may be completed in January 2017.
– 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.