The next stage in the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 will involve the daunting task of scouring the deep, unmapped floor of a remote part of the Indian Ocean, officials from Australia, Malaysia and China announced Monday as they met in Canberra to discuss the new phase of the search.

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The new phase will also re-examine all data gathered in the last two months to make sure the search teams have not missed out on crucial information that could point to the location of the missing plane, said the officials from Australia, Malaysia and China.

They will meet again on Wednesday to map out the detailed steps to be taken in the new phase of the search.  

One group will be re-examining all past satellite and military radar data received, including those that previously helped experts project the plane's likely flight path after it disappeared from air control tower radar screens on March 8.

Search operations head Angus Houston said the data review was important to make sure they made the right assumptions and deductions from it.

Another group will be looking at equipment needed for the deeper ocean search, which officials said would involve 60,000 square kilometers of deep seabed.  Already, they have begun contacting private companies and other governments that may have the appropriate equipment needed for the deeper sea probe.

The US Navy's Bluefin-21 robotic sub, which the search teams deployed in early April to search for the plane's black boxes following the detection of pings that were deemed consistent with black box signals, can only dive up to 4.5 kilometers deep.

Australian Transport Minister Warren Truss best described the challenge facing the new search when he said no one knows how deep that part of the Indian Ocean is because it has never been mapped before.

After Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced in late March that MH370 ended its flight in the remote southern part of the Indian Ocean, oceanographers had weighed in, saying that that body of water had never been mapped, and is generally avoided by shipping lines because of the extremely harsh weather conditions there.

Difficulties ahead notwithstanding, China vowed to continue the search for the missing plane that had 154 of its citizens on board, adding that its effort in the next phase of the search will be intensified, unrelenting and uninterrupted.

Transport Minister Yang Chuantang, who was in Canberra for the joint briefing on the new search phase, said China will give its utmost contribution to the search, be it in the area of finance, assets or expertise.

Twenty six countries had been involved in the search for MH370, scouring more than four million square kilometers of water, and spending more than 3,000 hours on air search.

But nearly two months into the search, no concrete proof has been found as to what happened to Flight MH370, and where it had gone.

It was due to land in Beijing from Kuala Lumpur at 6:30am on March 8, but never arrived.

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