In 2020, an amateur researcher spotted an elongated white object while browsing Apple Maps satellite images of the island of Nikumaroro in the western Pacific. In these blurry photos, it almost looked like a plane, much like the one Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan attempted to fly around the world in 1937.
The unusual shape, known as the Taraia object, immediately captivated researchers who had long searched for Earhart’s plane. Could she and Noonan have landed on a remote, uninhabited island and found themselves abandoned there, never to be seen or heard from again?
Last week, an expedition team arrived on Nikumaroro Island to investigate the Taraia object, hoping to finally solve the decades-old mystery of Earhart and Noonan’s disappearance. Their task was arduous. The object was located on the edge of the Taraia peninsula, in the island’s lagoon, and submerged in several meters of water, complicating investigation efforts. Additionally, Nikumaroro is teeming with coconut crabs, incredibly large crustaceans so oppressive that the team was unable to spend the night on the island.
Over the course of a week at Nikumaroro, the researchers spent four days studying the Taraia object, traveling back and forth between their ship and the lagoon daily. After all this, their searches came up empty.
“There are perhaps no words that better describe this expedition than Amelia Earhart’s: ‘The adventure is worth it,'” said Steve Schultz, expedition member and general counsel of Perdue University, in a statement. “We decided to test a hypothesis, not guarantee a particular outcome, and we followed the evidence to the end. »
A bouquet of trees
On Monday, the Taraia Object Expedition, a joint effort of the Archaeological Legacy Institute, the Purdue Research Foundation and Purdue University, confirmed that the visual anomaly was likely a clump of trees washed up on the peninsula’s sand.
Six years have passed since satellite images of the Taraia object were discovered, and by the time the expedition team reached the site, much of the debris had been washed away. Only a single Y-shaped segment remained, and its reflective surface, long cited as evidence that the object was metallic, could be explained by a thin layer of carbonate.
Although the expedition did not find Earhart’s plane, it discovered a number of interesting artifacts, including a 30-inch (76-centimeter) steel tube. Researchers will continue to study these objects, as they may provide evidence to support the fundamental hypothesis of the Taraia object: objects entering the lagoon through a natural channel on the west side of Nikumaroro can pass through the lagoon and wash up along the Taraia peninsula.
Indeed, researchers aren’t quite ready to abandon the idea that Earhart and Noonan might have been abandoned at Nikumaroro.
“The evidence for the castaway hypothesis — what brought us here — has remained very, very strong,” Rick Pettigrew, expedition leader and executive director of the Archaeological Legacy Institute, said in a video shared by Purdue. “We believe it is very likely that Amelia and her navigator Fred Noonan did indeed end up here on Nikumaroro Island.”
But for now, the mystery remains.
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