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A team of researchers is travelling to a remote Pacific island to investigate what may be the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s aircraft, according to the BBC.
The group from the US-based Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI) and Purdue University is expected to reach Nikumaroro Island by Monday, hoping to shed light on the aviator’s disappearance in 1937.
The researchers are seeking the so-called Taraia Object, first spotted at the edge of a lagoon in satellite images from 2020. Purdue University said the object is also visible in aerial photographs dating back to 1938.
The team is about halfway through an 830-mile voyage aboard the Marin Mainiku, a vessel operated by Kiribati National Shipping Line. It departed Kiribati’s capital on Wednesday.
On arrival, the researchers will have to pass through a narrow opening in the atoll’s reef, created by the British in 1963, the last time the island was inhabited.
“Finding Amelia Earhart’s Electra aircraft would be the discovery of a lifetime,” said Richard Pettigrew, head of ALI and leader of the expedition.
Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan reached Lae, Papua New Guinea, on 2 July 1937, after flying Earhart’s twin-engine Electra across South America, Africa and Asia. They planned to fly on to Hawaii and then return to California.
The aircraft disappeared while the pair were trying to reach Howland Island, an uninhabited coral island near Nikumaroro, to refuel. The accepted explanation is that communication problems prevented them from locating the island and that the aircraft ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean. No physical evidence has been recovered.
One theory holds that Earhart accidentally reached Nikumaroro, where she abandoned the aircraft and died. Images of the Taraia Object appear to show the remains of a small plane in shallow water, but some researchers dispute that interpretation.
Ric Gillespie, an expert in recovering historic aircraft wrecks, told Reuters that the object looked like a tree that had fallen from the atoll into the water. He said he would like to find Earhart’s plane but did not expect the object to be it.
The expedition team points to earlier evidence of human presence on the atoll in the 1930s and forensic analysis of skeletal remains found there in the 1940s as support for its theory. Gillespie, however, believes the aircraft may have broken apart and its fragments been carried into the Pacific depths.
Previous searches have also failed to locate the aircraft. In 2024, researchers said sonar images may have revealed it about 4,877 metres (16,000 feet) below the sea near Howland Island, but the object was later identified as a rock formation. A 2019 expedition investigating a photograph that appeared to show landing gear near Nikumaroro also found nothing.
