An expedition to find evidence of Amelia Earhart’s missing plane near a remote South Pacific island has ended in failure, researchers said Sunday.
Researchers from the Archaeological Legacy Institute and Purdue University embarked the Taraia Object expedition this month to Nikumaroro, an uninhabited coral atoll in the Phoenix Islands belonging to the Republic of Kiribati.
The team sought to identify an anomaly first seen in satellite images in 2020. Experts have long suspected Nikumaroro of being the landing site of Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, who disappeared in July 1937.
However, the expedition “found no conclusive evidence to support the hypothesis that the wreckage” of Earhart’s plane was “in a lagoon on a remote atoll in the South Pacific,” the university said in a press release.
“We think it is very likely that the object is a collection of accumulated debris here,” Rick Pettigrew, executive director of ALI, said in a video message.
The expedition determined that the anomaly was most likely “a collection of large trees deposited along the peninsula’s sandbox.” When the team arrived, much of the “debris had fragmented and washed away.” What remained was a Y-shaped segment that was only a small fraction of the original size of the satellite-observed anomaly.
The reflective surface of the anomaly, which was “long associated with the idea that the object was a metallic substance”, was found to be a carbonate veneer, meaning it contained a layer of carbon-rich sediment.
“We accomplished our goal of determining what the Taraia object was,” Pettigrew said. “Our team remains in good spirits and proud of what has been accomplished. »
Earhart was seeking to become the first woman to fly around the world when she and Noonan disappeared in their Lockheed Electra 10-E.
A U.S. Coast Guard vessel lost contact with the two men on the morning of July 2, 1937, as they attempted to travel to Howland Island, about 400 miles northwest of Nikumaroro.
The expedition to find Earhart’s plane took off from Tarawa, in the Republic of Kiribati, on October 6 and traveled for five days by sea to Nikumaroro.
Although it has not solved one of the world’s greatest mysteries, the expedition said its efforts strongly support the broader castaway hypothesis – a theory that Earhart and Noonan did not crash into the sea but landed on the flat Nikumaroro reef and were abandoned.
Some artifacts found on the island indicate that Earhart and Noonan’s plane may have landed there, including glass bottles from the 1930s and a women’s makeup compact, the expedition said.
He said he found “numerous artifacts through maritime and terrestrial archeology efforts, including an approximately 30-inch-long steel tube discovered in the lagoon near the Taraia Peninsula,” which will be the subject of further study.
“Amelia Earhart never gave up – she continued to push the boundaries and fly into the unknown,” Steve Schultz, Purdue general counsel and expedition member, said in a statement. “That same fire fuels our search. She continued to fly and we will continue to search.”
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