A team backed by Purdue University has arrived at Nikumaroro, a remote Pacific atoll in Kiribati, to investigate a long-debated underwater shape that some researchers believe could be the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra — nearly 90 years after the aviator vanished over the Pacific.
The team, led by Richard Pettigrew, is focused on the so-called "Taraia Object," a roughly 12-to-14-meter anomaly in a lagoon that first became visible in satellite imagery in 2015, not long after a tropical cyclone passed the island. Its length is close to that of the Electra's 12.2-meter fuselage, a coincidence researchers who favor the "Nikumaroro Hypothesis" — the theory that Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan landed and died as castaways on the atoll — say is worth taking seriously.
After a five-day, 830-nautical-mile voyage, the expedition plans to use sonar, magnetometers and other archaeological tools to examine what lies beneath the lagoon's sediment. If the object turns out to be promising, the team hopes to pursue a full excavation next year, pending permission from Kiribati's government.
Not everyone is convinced there is anything to find. Ric Gillespie, who leads a competing Earhart research group, has argued the object is more likely a fallen tree swept into the lagoon by the storm. Decades of competing theories — crash-and-sink in open ocean, a secret Japanese capture, life as a castaway — have never been definitively resolved, and searches of Nikumaroro have previously turned up inconclusive bone fragments and artifacts but no confirmed aircraft wreckage.
Earhart and Noonan disappeared on July 2, 1937, while attempting to become the first pilots to circle the globe near the equator. Whether this expedition ends the mystery or adds one more false lead to its long history should become clearer once the sonar results come in.
